Frescoes by the Bay: Art, Artists, and Their Stories – Book I

Here we have a beautiful landscape-format artbook of eighty-five photographs of frescoes that appear in various places in San Francisco. Author Karen Norton-Sinell reproduced these as high-quality photos in Frescoes by the Bay. The production is high-end and on glossy, heavy paper stock, so the book is ready to be part of a coffee-table collection. The book is about half text by the author, providing us with good explanations of what we see. She starts with detailed description of how frescoes are made and the two types of frescoes artists can choose from. All frescoes are from the 1930s, when Depression-era artists were provided funds nationwide to undertake their art. San Francisco was richly rewarded during the process, particularly Coit Tower, where fifty-eight of the frescoes appear. Although there are many fresco artists, their styles are similar. Most paintings depict various areas of life, agriculture, and industry of California, with subjects such as children, sports, and hunting. The full-page photos are numbered, and at the end of the volume, brief credits appear with each number giving the artist’s name, title, size of the fresco, date of painting, and location. The author did a great job in photography and writing.