SOMA, Tenderloin, Market Street, July 30, 2011

A while back I was walking in my own neighborhood, SOMA,  (this is Berwick and Heron off of Harrison or 8th Streets) and in this little alley I came across this great big bear.

Well as I was wandering The Tenderloin Forest, I came across this guy

I knew I had seen this work before and was happy to see another wonderful character.  Then last week I was driving through the intersection of Market and 6th Street and what do I see?

The artist is Chad Hasegawa.  He was born in Hawaii and has quite a repertoire.  This excerpt is from an interview he did with Blackbook Art Magazine.

“Grizzly bears are just something I enjoy painting and I really enjoy painting them big. They represent an outsider coming into a tamed city of walls all the way from nature. They represent the West and a lot of other things, especially in San Francisco. The way I see it, they came here first. And they probably came here for the same reasons we came here. San Francisco is an amazing place and in this 7×7 mile radius there is a lot going on here with the weather, the hills, the water, and the fog. I mean, there were 10,000 grizzly bears that used to live here and were forced to get along and agree with one another and stand together, and they were so stoked to be here that they had to be sucka free and didn’t mind living so close together. Or there were some bears that just didn’t get it and were forced to leave or left here on their own, just like us. ”