There's something quietly defiant about someone showing up to San Francisco in 2025 and pulling out oil paints instead of a smartphone.
British artist Rob Pointon did exactly that with his Steep Streets series — a collection of oil-on-board paintings capturing the city's iconic inclines in rich, textured strokes. No filters. No AI upscaling. Just pigment, a board, and the kind of patience that San Francisco's current culture seems allergic to.
And honestly? The results are stunning.
The paintings render SF's vertiginous geography with a warmth and immediacy that photography often flattens out. You can practically feel the gradient in your calves. The light has that particular late-afternoon Bay quality — golden but restless, like it knows fog is coming. It's the kind of art that makes you actually see a city you walk through every day without looking.
As one local put it: "That's an awesome different perspective. I love it."
It's worth pausing on what makes this resonate. San Francisco has become, for better or worse, a city experienced primarily through screens — through Yelp ratings, Instagram stories, and overstuffed tourist itineraries that treat neighborhoods like checkboxes. One resident captured that vibe perfectly when talking about visitors trying to cram everything in: "Doable but kind of outside the old school way of San Francisco, which is to be in the moment."
Pointon's work is the opposite of that frantic energy. It's slow. It's analog. It demands you stand still and look.
We spend a lot of ink in this column scrutinizing what the city gets wrong — the budget bloat, the bureaucratic dysfunction, the inexplicable decisions. Fair enough. But every now and then it's worth remembering that San Francisco remains one of the most visually extraordinary cities on the planet. Its bones are magnificent. Forty-three hills of them.
No government program built that beauty, and no amount of mismanagement can fully erase it. Sometimes it just takes a guy with a paintbrush to remind you it's still there.