Our clients purchased two remarkable properties — a grande dame Victorian in Alamo Square and a chic, sleek Midcentury Modern in Palm Springs — so we wanted to do something a little extra special for a client gift. We commissioned local artist and San Francisco native Douglas Gorney to create watercolor portraits of both homes. Our clients were delighted and touched by them.

We really enjoyed working with Doug, and established a good rapport while discussing the best ways to capture the essence of each home. He took a little time out of his schedule to chat with us here.

How long have you been painting? What is your training?

I went to art school back in the '80s with the intention of becoming a sculptor. I was all set to start a career doing that when life took a series of left turns and I didn't pick up a pencil again for 25 years. Then some other left turns brought me back to art. And this time (a) I really had the fire in the belly to make a career of it, and (b) my art was coming out two- instead of three-dimensional.

Why do you prefer working in watercolor?

My girlfriend gave me a box of beautiful watercolors out the blue, or should I say ultramarine — my first grown-up set! So they kind of fell in my lap.

In answer to your previous question, while I'd taken a lot of drawing classes at CCAC [now CCA] and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, I knew virtually nothing about watercolor. But once you start working with the medium you realize you're no longer in charge — watercolors gonna do what they're gonna do, and your job is simply to give them the space to do it. The flow state you have to be in with watercolor is a thing in itself.

It’s a translucent medium: you're seeing through the colors to the white paper below in a way that for me honors the magical light in San Francisco.

As a practical matter, they're so portable and low-maintenance. No turpentine, dropcloth, or easel...I do a lot of my work at my desk in my bedroom. And then I can pick up and join my local urban sketching group, the Sunset Sketchers, to paint an Outer Avenues streetscape while sitting on a fire hydrant.

What draws you to the houses and city scenes of San Francisco?

I mentioned the light — I'll put our light up against Paris' or even the South of France's any day.

Those hills: singular, Diebenkornian angles and vistas.

For the architecturally oriented you've got everything from gingerbread Victorians to the corporate futurescapes of the Financial Disrict and Mission Bay. The Sunset District is a weird, boxy, close-packed, low-rise, pastel suburbia at the edge of the world.

Culturally, San Francisco wears its diversity on its sleeves. You can walk a mile on Outer Geary seeing only ideograms and Cyrillic. If it's socked in out there it 'll be sunny and hot in the Mission, with its bumping lowriders, bewhiskered baristas, and scrappy, passionate galleristas.

What are the challenges in painting the city?

You mean, aside from making living as a full-time artist in San Francisco?

As a San Francisco native, do you see your work as a means of preserving a nostalgic view of the city, or are you also interested in capturing the new?

Good question. I think if I lived back in North Beach/Telegraph Hill, where I grew up, I'd be painting the San Francisco that was, the city I knew, the past I still see when I'm there. Now I live in the Sunset, a place I never set foot in until moving here a few years ago. The light on the west side, the space, the style…generations of families have lived come up in this, but it's all fresh and new to me. That keeps me in the here and now.

As locked into a fairy-tale past as OG San Franciscans can be, there are whole swathes of the city that have emerged, science-fictionally, out of nothing. I painted Chase Center a few months ago, Downtown SF and the Port of Oakland floating spectrally in those vast, blue-green windows. Mission Bay is like a CGI image from Inception — was all that even there five minutes ago?

You really go beyond just trying to create a realistic image of a place, imbuing it with personality and life. What is your process?

I appreciate that! Well, if that's so I honestly don't know where it comes from. I wish I could tell you I had a conscious, intentional process wherein I invested myself in the narrative or the terroir, but I'm just trying to paint the shadows from a fire escape, the scrolly bits on a Victorian. I kind of have my hands full.

Maybe it's just a sense of awe about painting: watching a scene unfold almost of its own initiative, even as I'm convinced I've made a hash of it.

If someone asks you to paint his house or her business. you've got to be as present as you can so you can represent it — you or whatever's working through you. As challenging as some of these settings can be, the key seems to be to get out of the way.

What's the most interesting commission you've had?

A lingerie store on Sacramento St. comes to mind.

Or maybe Donut Time, a cafe/bakery on Noriega that sells crullers and red bean cakes. Include the decades of grime over the Chinese characters on the awning, I was told. "And you'll see a knot of old guys smoking outside, they're always there. Paint them, too."

That nostalgic view of the city you asked about — it's always so personal. Sometimes you're just painting someone else's memory. A gentleman who grew up out here in the aves wanted me to paint his house as it was when he was a kid, reconstructing the lawn, the hedges, the color of the house and his dad's long-gone 1967 Ford Country Squire wagon in the driveway. None of which I had photos of.

I'm always up for a challenge.

You can see more of Doug’s work at gorney.studio.