You are crawling through the desert, on hands and knees. The shimmering wave of heat off the sand beckons with the promise of pools of cool water that seem to get further away.
Cut to Lawton and 43rd Avenue, in the Outer
Sunset district of San Francisco. There
you will find a real oasis.
The Great Highway Gallery is what drew me here, after reading about it
in Sam Whiting’s Visual Arts column in the August 25 San Francisco Chronicle.
San Francisco Artist Anna Conti had a home gallery nearby
until she and her husband, photographer David Sumner, moved to the booming art
scene in MidTown Reno a year ago. http://www.bigcrow.com
Great Highway is a small, narrow gallery, with two driftwood benches and a quiet dog/doorman/velvet rope guest curator. Gallery owner John Lindsey also offers fine
art printing and other art and design services. Great Highway is currently hosting “Ente
Fleurs et Mer,” still life and landscape paintings by Marie Van Elder, through September 24.
Next door to the left is Lawton Trading Post, “a community gathering space” offering pop-up events, music, and classes, today being: Summer Preserving: Jamming and Pickling Class with
Chef Lisal Moran.
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Photo: Fred Pompermayer
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To the right of the gallery is Alex Martins Surfboard Repair, “offering high quality ding repair,” and an
excellent web site for yoga and surf related links. Standing out in front, seeing dozens of well
used surfboards of many colors and sizes in vertical and horizontal racks, I thought it
is an art gallery in its own right. I
pictured James Michener, sitting outside, scribbling an outline for a 600 page
book detailing all the beaches where each board had played and plied its trade, plus
a few hundred pages of the history and the ancestors of all the board owners.
Exhausted from such thoughts, I moved right to see the line
out the door at the Gallery recommended Andytown Coffee Roasters. One of the employees was sitting outside, eating
the last piece (“employee benefit”) of a tasty looking slice of fresh bread choked
into submission by a half jar of Nutella.
This little place somehow has FOUR bakers, and they turn out an array
of Irish family recipe breads, plus muffins and scones.
For the month of October, The Great Highway Gallery will be the site of ArtSpan SF Open Studios Hub Exhibition, featuring Open Studios artists.
Posted by Phil Gravitt
Posted by Phil Gravitt
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