Shrey Purohit

I paint city life in oil and acrylic. My subject is San Francisco, its streets, transit, weather and people. Capturing the fog, the early bus rides, the storefront signs that carry a neighborhood's pulse. There's a version of this city that only shows up at the edges of the day, half asleep, half lit, and that's the one I keep coming back to. I grew up in Mumbai and call San Francisco home now, and both cities show up in the work.

I build the paintings in layers. Along with the paint, I work in collaging ephemera, old photographs, signage, flyers, receipts, paper that was part of a place before it ended up on my canvas. My process starts outside, drawing, documenting and painting plein air first, then bringing the work into the studio and opening it up into something wider, more cinematic.

My early work followed neighborhood scenes, transit and city streets. Lately I've been more interested in the people who actually keep this city moving. My current project, Unsung SF: Portraits of the Working City, is a series of large scale portraits of postal carriers, baristas, cleaners, the people whose routines hold the place together. Each one starts with a paid interview, and each painting carries real objects from that person's day, the things that shape how they move through it.

What I want, in the end, is simple. I want the people in these paintings to be looked at the way they deserve to be looked at, and I want a record that their work mattered. Art doesn't need four walls and a price list to count. Some of its best homes are the ordinary places people already walk through every day.