I’ve been admiring the works of Scott Barry for years without ever knowing much about him. The San Francisco-based artist, designer and founder of the Birdstand website has had gallery showings worldwide. He also works with the brilliant production studio, Mekanism, and has directed the 50 mini-shorts for their new website.

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I had the opportunity to get a sneak preview of Brett Amory’s new works at his studio a few months back, one of which was twenty foot wide. Soft spoken, expansively talented and dedicated to his craft, Amory walked me through his almost fifteen step process. Marked by an almost alarmingly soothing color palette, this San Francisco-based artist has been toiling away on a series about ‘people waiting’. Whether waiting for the muni, or watching scooters pass us by on the street, we can’t seem to get enough of art that lets us love the Bay Area that much more. Seeing his pieces in person is what really brings it together, so if you’re in San Francisco, and want to see our home town pride in full effect, hit 111 Minna Gallery this coming Thursday night to see this amazing four person exhibit, Common Descent. I interviewed Amory just days before his opening.
When was the last time you did a show of this size? Is there a theme or idea around this series of paintings?
‘It is a group show with three other guys, but 111 Minna is a pretty big space, so I should be able to put up a good amount of work. I just did a two-man show at Gescheidle Art Gallery in Chicago back in May, and I had sixteen smaller passport portraits in that show. I will be showing paintings from the Waiting series. The series is about the anticipation of the next moment and not being present’.

I had the opportunity to come see your studio a couple of months ago, and when I was there we were talking a lot about your creative process. How would you describe your process? Do you start with sketching?
‘I usually start off taking pictures of people waiting for stuff, then I go through the pictures and start montaging them together in Photoshop. After I come up with something I like, I’ll do a really loose five-minute painting with a really big brush. I take a picture of the painting and add the picture to the Photoshop file changing the original image. I repeat the process of going back and forth between the image and the painting until I have what I want or until the image gets too confusing. The painting changes the image, the image changes the painting. It’s a fun way to work’.

I LOVE the color palette for your pieces for this show. Is there an inspiration that these come from?
‘Thanks a lot. Colour is a weird thing for me. There are about three sets of paintings in the show each having a separate palate. When I first started the series, I was using a lot negative space and white, the paintings were more on the high key side. I used a lot of pastel colour for the subjects and the figures were a little washed out. I did about five like that. For the second set of the series, the color was pretty neutral, almost monochromatic. Lots of grays. The last five or so, the colour got pretty bright and saturated. My colour changes based on how I feel. I’ll do neutral paintings focusing more on value, then I get sick of the lack of colour and do some bright saturated paintings’.

San Fransisco-based artist Alexis MacKenzie must be patient. She has to be in order to create beautiful collages from the vintage books that she collects. There’s an amazing amount of detail in each piece. Elements are painstakingly transplanted from book to paper with scissors and glue. No Photoshop cut n’ pastes here.

The Bay Area is home to many things that remind us of our lost childhood, our forgotten innocence, and deep seeded secrets and dreams. Berkeley-based artist, Kukula, is one of those such reminders. This week she is travelling to Los Angelese with one of her largest exhibitions to date. Dream Catcher will open this Friday, March 14th, at Thinkspace Gallery. Her blog states: ‘In the past, whenever I began working on a show, I tried to capture an emotion that was generated by some important experience in my life. I tried to document the feeling, not the event. This time I am attempting to catch emotional currents with no evident experiential origin. Whereas my past paintings represented the nightmare feeling of real life, here I want to depict the emotional utopia one tries to keep sheltered within’.

The word Maiko is a Japanese term that describes a young Geisha. The Maiko toy is a collaboration between dodgrr and SKAFFS and the prototype will be launched at the Cartoon Art Museum at the WonderCon Convention in San Francisco on February 24 from 1-5 pm. [see more SKAFFS]

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My town is one of foghorns at five am, the smell of salty air and the sound of seagulls, Peets coffee, steep hills and die hard fans and loyalists. For those of us who have been here in San Francisco for some time now, we know all the secret gems of this small city — from Clarion Alley, to Army Street, from Irving to Broadway. Sometimes, though, although the city is only 7×7 miles, we forget and need to be reminded about the vintage bell-ringing trolley-cars, the custom painted houses with bay windows, and a bridge that is painted a beautiful venetian red every day of the year. Lucky for us we have the What I’m Seeing website to take us all back and give us a visual petit-four of San Francisco. My favorite was the recent post about the old Muni cars, which is the local’s way to get around the city.

*From the decaying European streets of Buenos Aires to the smoky punk clubs of Beijing, rad stuff is happening everywhere. Sign up for our free weekly newsletter to keep up*

Every year on Valentine’s Day, doting couples typically do the usual thing — chocolates, dinner, flowers and so on, ad nauseum. Here in San Francisco, we do things just a little bit differently. Forget that old stuff that was made for our grandma and grandpa and join us for our annual Valentine’s Day pillow fight! Gotta love the Bay. [see also the giant pillow fight in New York's Union Square]