"The Point"

From a distance, most of the buildings at “The Point,” the artist’s colony at Hunters Point Naval Shipyard look as if they are abandoned. They’re all the same bland concrete color and when viewed against the backdrop of the empty ship building facilities it seems impossible that anything lively is going on here. On closer inspection, however, it is obvious in many small ways that there are artists around here somewhere.

There is a turquoise-colored lawn jockey looking over one small garden. Another is the home of a plaster Marlin playing what looks to be a plaster cello. There are dots of color from bright flowers outside in some places, in others it looks as barren as the shipyard.

According to its website, “The point” was started in 1980 when Jacques Terzian a manufacturer of found-object furniture approached the Navy about renting a building to manufacture furniture. The Navy leased him the space and Terzian renovated several buildings with the idea of providing artist studios at an affordable price to local artists. The idea worked. Today there are more than 250 artists and musicians working there.

It’s very quiet here. There is no traffic nearby. No fire engines or busses or people’s voices cutting through the air. The main building’s entrance yard is peppered with metal sculptures. They are cut out metal, all humanoid with different expressions on each of their faces. There are two comical life-sized metal forged stick-figure sculptures that look like they are jumping for joy.

Lynn Sneed is squatting outside on the sidewalk using a blowtorch to melt the wax on a framed piece of art-in-the-making. She explains that she and her friend are learning a new technique of adding, melting and spreading different colored wax onto canvasses that have gesso on them already. She says that it’s really difficult to control the flow of the wax. She isn’t allowed to use a torch inside, so here she is. She is using the studio of her friend, Paula.

Paula Clark, a watercolor artist and a sculptor has had her studio space her at “The Point” since 1999. She is able to afford the rent here and continue to make art. She does not make her living from her art. She’s a psychotherapist. Her studio is crowded with pots of dry watercolor paints of various colors, framed and unframed watercolor paintings and sculptures of stone and wire. “The Clash” is playing on the stereo and Clark is busily working on a piece, putting images cut from a magazine on her canvas before she begins applying the wax. She and Sneed took an intensive class in the medium a few months ago and have set out to master it.

Sculptor David Dion has been making his art at “The Point” since 1983. He said he had a studio on Third Street before that, but rents were going up and someone there told him about “The Point.” He moved his tools over and has been here ever since. Dion makes sculptures out of wood that he laminates together, then sands and cuts away. His large studio has about a half inch of sawdust on the floor and dozens of sculptures that look like odd-shaped buildings from the past and future.

They are each about the size of an old-fashioned 28” television set. The studio smells like glue and tobacco. Dion smokes a cigarette down to the filter as he explains how he makes his sculptures. He pays $330 a month in rent and says it has hardly gone up since he moved in. He said he knows that the building he is in got a new lease from the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency when they teamed up with Lennar Corporation to re-build the area, but some of the other buildings were not so lucky. Many artists were evicted.

Though the surroundings have a haunted ghost town feel, “The Point” is full of creative people. For the time being the artists and the red-tailed hawks are the only ones here. One wonders what this place will look like in five years. Glitzier and with more amenities, probably—perhaps there will be bathrooms instead of porto-potties, sod-lawn instead of many small gardens. In a perfect world, the Marlin will continue its serenade.