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The men behind the Glen Park Station window art

October 30, 2014 by Elizabeth Weise

Within an hour of the Giants winning, the Glen Park Station received new artwork celebrating the Giants win. Photo: Andrew Greenstein).
Within an hour of the Giants winning, Lucas Armand was putting the finishing touches on new artwork celebrating the Giants win, at the Glen Park Station bar. Photo: Andrew Greenstein).

Murray Schneider

Sixty years ago Halloween trick-or-treaters trooped along Diamond Street, armed with shopping bags in one hand and bars of Lava soap in the other. If business or homeowners didn’t continue filling their bags, kids might soap merchant windows and the windows of parked Chevys, Fords and Plymouths.

Tricksters were pretty benign all those years ago; soap, after all, is water-soluble.

Glen Park Station owner Tom Coulter
Glen Park Station owner Tom Coulter

These days, Tom Coulter, owner of Glen Park Station, pays Lucas Armand and Johnny Breeding to paint his saloon’s windows, and the paint is removed with razor blades.

It’s October, after all, and an even year to boot. So Glen Park’s venerable bar’s Halloween windows share space with that other American pastime — baseball.

“I like it and our customers appreciate it,” said Coulter, as he stood before Armand and Breeding’s “splash” art, which this year boasts tombstones, one of which announces: ‘RIP Cardinals.’

That’s the St. Louis Cardinals

Lucas Armand
Lucas Armand

Glen Park was waking up the morning Tom Coulter carried bags filled with hot dogs and buns into his bar. Coulter anticipated a Giants come back after their 3-2 drubbing by the Kansas City Royals in Game 3 of the World Series.

Armand and Breeding had come back, too, returning to the neighborhood watering hole after Travis Ishikawa’s National League pennant-winning walk off home run had put the last nail into the Card’s coffin. The two window artists had added the words “The World Series – Champions 2010, 2012” above their earlier orange and black GIANTS inscription.

Johnny Breeding
Johnny Breeding

Below it, the two friends, who had traveled to San Francisco together from Portland 32 years ago, had painted “World Series – 2014.”

Fingering a one-inch foam brush and balancing two containers of acrylic paint atop Coulter’s ledge, Armand surveyed his work. Images of full employment ran through his mind as he mentally calculated the 24 other venues who’d employ him now that the Giants were making a run at their third world championship in five years.

“I’ll be painting all over town now,” said Armand, who was born in Eaglepass, Texas and who counts as his clients Squat & Gobble and Van Ness Avenue and Market Street automobile dealerships. “I missed most of the Cardinal series because I was doing a Crepevine in Berkeley.”

Window art is an old and honored form of outdoor advertising. It’s kept graphic artists employed and created customer awareness well before Steve Jobs ever dreamed of dolling up computer fonts. Such sign painting, reliant upon graceful parabolas, often accompanied department store window displays featuring well-appointed mannequins.

TombstonesAround the same time mischievous kids conjured soaping windows along Chenery Street, mothers dragged their children to shop at Union Square. There they watched window trimmers such as Armand and Breeding plying their craft at City of Paris and I.Magnin. In those days Woolworths served up submarine sandwiches and MacFarlane Candies dished out double-decker ice cream cones. Glen Park moms bribed their kids with these offerings. With a hoagie and a block of rocky road chocolate in each hand, Sussex and Surrey Street kids watched window artists perform their magic.

All these years later the tradition continues.

“I was painting a window at a restaurant at Market and Church a few years ago, and a mother walked over and said her five year old son was a tough critic and wanted to talk to me,” said Armand. “The mom said her boy was ‘brutally honest.’”

Armand held his breath as the boy closed in on him.

“Your work is really great. I like it,” said the five-year old.

“I’d made the grade,” said Armand. “I felt validated.”

Splash art relies on cursive strokes and follows limited borders. It has few guidelines and fewer parameters. Unlike other art, it’s supposed to be temporary, created from memory, designed to become catchy, hand-painted commercial window campaigns.

“It’s from memory, neither studied nor sketched beforehand,” said Armand. “I get out of my car, carry my paints to a window and toss up a drawing on the spot. There are no stencils or patterns.”

In other words, Lucas Armand simply splashes it on.

“I was trained as an architect, but I liked this sort of work,” Armand said. “It keeps me outside and it incorporates art into business.”

“I’ve always been artist, though,” he said. “When I first got to San Francisco in 1982 I was homesick. I saved $1,400 painting for two solid weeks. I used the money I made and returned to Portland with lots of Christmas presents.”

Lucas Armand is rarely without paint and brush, working Mission Street bars, coffee shops such as Tart to Tart in the Inner Sunset and lots of restaurants, several taking him to the East Bay. There’s not a holiday — St. Patrick’s Day, Christmas, Valentine’s Day, Thanksgiving, Independence Day, and Gay Pride Week — that doesn’t see Armand and Breeding’s imprimaturs.

Their efforts aren’t without downsides, though.

“Once I was doing a Squat & Gobble and a City cleaning crew drove up and washed down the window before it could even dry,” said Armand. “Another time a police officer got out of his patrol car and yelled ‘get down from there.’ He thought I was a tagger. I told them I get paid for this.”

Barkeep Tom Coulter has been paying Lucas Armand for nearly 10 years now.

“Christmas time is always the best,” said Armand, who lived in Diamond Heights for three years. “Kids come close and get really involved and ask, ‘Are you an artist?’ Their eyes light up and they ask do you color outside the lines?”

It during this season, when reindeers fly, that Armand’s art, full of squiggles and curlicues that delight children, refuses to remain within linear boundaries.

“Once, during Easter, though, I painted a bunny on a Squat & Gobble, but it was kind of frightening so I took it off,” said Armand, who moonlights creating digital images that he shops around card shops and science fiction bookstores.

“You know. Sign painting is a dying art,” he said, with a shrug of resignation. “It’s a joy, though. Each window is a joy.”

The word die isn’t in the 2014 San Francisco Giants vocabulary.

Two days before Halloween they didn’t think of giving up the ghost.

The day after Armand and Breeding’s final Series brush stroke, Bruce Bochy’s team went on to wax the Royals 11-4 in a four-hour marathon Game 4, and a day later, on Madison Bumgarner’s mythic left arm, they shutout Kansas City 5-0 in Game 5.

After the KC sixth game 10-0-blowout, it all came down to arguably the most exciting event in American sports.

Tied three games to three, the Giants needed only nine more innings to squeak out a 3-2 win and become the best team in Major League baseball, winning on Joe Panik’s peerless glove and on Bumgarner’s arm yet again.

“They keep on coming back, those Giants,” said Tom Coulter,

So does Lucas Armand who decided to put his acrylics away, take a step through the swinging door of his favorite saloon and lift a beer not a brush.

“I watched the game at the Glen Park Station,” he said.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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IMPORTANT UPCOMING DATES

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Meet at 300 Mateo (x Arlington) for an exciting day of weeding, watering, seed collecting.
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Glen Park Association is at Glen Park Greenway.
2 days ago
Glen Park Association

Saturday’s Glen Park Greenway Work Party is Cancelled.

“I’m very sorry to say that
we have cancelled our Work Party for this Saturday July 12, along with all organized volunteer activity on the Greenway until further notice.
As you may have read in the news, our fiscal sponsor, San Francisco Parks Alliance (SFPA), has shut itself down. Just as SFPA has shut itself down, the Greenway, as an organized part of SFPA, has also been “shut down.” We are busy looking for a suitable alternative fiscal sponsor that is willing to replace SFPA. That search is going well but it is a slow process. We had hoped to find temporary ways to enable the Greenway project to function responsibly as a community activity without a fiscal sponsor. Sadly, despite our best efforts and the help of many others in Glen Park, we have failed. That is why we must cancel our Saturday Work Party and discontinue future work parties and other organized volunteer activity on the Greenway (like weeding and watering) until further notice. We recognize that the Greenway is public open space and that the organizers of the Greenway project have no control over the activities of you or of anyone else on the Greenway. However, if you do venture onto the Greenway to satisfy your urge for outdoor recreation, please be aware that your activity is not in any way organized or sanctioned by the organizers of the Glen Park Greenway project. I’m well aware of the efforts that many of the
Greenway’s supporters are making to get the Greenway organized with a new fiscal sponsor and I’m confident that this will be arranged within weeks or perhaps a few months.
However long it takes, I will contact you with news of our progress.
Many thanks for all that you do for the Greenway.”

Nicholas Dewar, volunteer Project Director

#glenparkgreenway #glenparksf #sanfrancisco @rafaelmandelmand8 @danielluriesf @crosstowntrail
#crosstowntrail #sfparksalliance #publicspace #nature
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Wonder what’s stopping just organizing it separate from that non-profit. It seems like the volunteers largely come from Glen Park.

Glen Park Association is at Laidley Street SFO.
6 days ago
Glen Park Association

It was a beautiful day for the annual #july4th celebration on Laidley street!

📷: Photos courtesy of Michael Waldstein

#glenparksf #sanfrancisco #laidley
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It was a beautiful day for the annual #july4th celebration on Laidley street! 

📷: Photos courtesy of Michael Waldstein 

#glenparksf #sanfrancisco #laidley
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