Ask Me SF Art Projects

Hello! I’m Ellen. If you read why I created Ask Me SF, part of my personal initiatives of making San Francisco enjoyable is to beautify the city with art, with a focus on spaces that have been damaged or graffitied and could use some beautification. I find it especially gratifying to help businesses that may not have had the resources to improve their storefronts.

Beautifying San Francisco with Art

How it started…

Particularly during the pandemic, I felt like every day I was seeing another window at a local establishment getting broken and then boarded up. I felt very sad that not only were businesses incurring huge lost revenue from pandemic fears, but now were also dealing with having their windows broken. Replacing glass is very expensive, particularly for custom shaped windows. Worst yet, some of these vandalism acts were racially motivated and anti-Asian. I live near Ocean Avenue, where one man rode around on a scooter with a slingshot and was responsible for 27 break-ins.

In fortuitous timing, just as I was pondering how I could possibly help, I saw an article about how SF Beautiful was offering grants for SF residents to beautify their neighborhood. Never mind that I had never really painted a mural before, other than for the tiki bar in our basement… surely I could do one on plywood! The form seemed simple enough — outline your idea, where you plan to execute, give an estimate for how much it will cost. But where to do it…

A “Case Study” with Ocean Ale House

One of my favorite beer bars / local watering holes, Ocean Ale House, was in the process of expanding next door to accommodate a larger performance space for live music. As a result, they put up a piece of plywood to bridge the two spaces while they worked on taking down the wall in between them. This piece of plywood was quickly graffitied and I felt like it made the bar and our neighborhood look shabby.

I asked the owner, Miles Escobedo, if he would mind if I painted the plywood at no cost to him. Never mind that I didn’t actually have an approved grant quite yet. Miles didn’t miss a beat and his response was quick: “Go for it, dude!”. OK, so I now had a location! But what would I paint?

I came up with the idea for the mural after chatting with one of the bartenders there. She suggested that I depict the bars’ larger-than-life owner, Miles Escobedo, and his very recognizable beard and hair. Miles’ flowing locks reminded me of the iconic poster for JOB cigarettes from the famous Art Nouveau artist, Alphonse Mucha. I tried to combine the essence of the JOB poster with Miles’ profile picture for the Ingleside Community Power members page. Miles can commonly be heard in the bar asking if his patrons are “raging” and makes a “love” hand sign as he instructs them to rage on. I felt like it only made sense to incorporate these aspects into my mural to make it more Miles.

I quickly learned that I had completely underestimated the cost of paint for the mural. I had requested $250 in my grant, which basically was the cost of about three 1 gallon-sized paint colors. The anti-graffiti coating suggested by my husband would have blown over my budget on it’s own. I explained my sob story to the Sherwin Williams on Ocean Avenue, and they generously extended contractor’s pricing to me for the project. This got me to primer, 4 colors (red, blue, yellow, black), and the anti-graffiti coating. I also realized that painting on plywood and especially covering up the existing graffiti was very challenging, as the porous wood soaks up the paint.

Soon though, I was able to get going and I received a lot of positive commentary from passersby and I even ran into some of my neighbors. I ended up using some of the leftover paint to create a mural for Champa Garden. The theme of orchids is due to the fact that “Champa” means orchids in Sanskrit. A big thank you to SF Beautiful for the support! Read more about the other neighborhood grants that SF Beautiful sponsored here.