The original Tower Records. The big, dripping faucet over the door of Red's Electric and Plumbing. The façade of the Esquire Theater (now preserved in a shiny high-rise).
The sights that distinguish Sacramento from every other urban landscape get documented in Paul Guyer's acrylic paintings. A mechanical engineer turned artist, Guyer, '62, captures the ever evolving intersection of time and location in his hometown.w
In a painting of the Esquire Theater, built in 1940, the marquee touts The Bandit of Sherwood Forest "in glorious Technicolor." Technology marches on: His painting of the current incarnation shows the Esquire is now an IMAX theater.
"In all of my works there is an instantaneousness about them," Guyer says. "There are people, cars, light, shadows—things that are only there for a fleeting instant. . . . I paint the people, the automobiles and advertising signs. I call it 'urban furniture'—the newspaper racks and trash cans. You have to have all that to have a real cityscape."
Illustration: Courtesy Paul GuyerGuyer took only two art classes at Stanford—and those "basically to pad my GPA." But he felt nurtured by a then new division of the Engineering School. "The whole idea of the Design Division was to get the very few mechanical engineers who were artistically oriented and train them in product design. . . . It was a terrific experience. It fed both sides of my brain." He worked as an engineer for decades, but "decided to get serious" about his art in the '80s.
Guyer, who grew up in East Sacramento, works from photographs dating from his birthdate—February 12, 1941—until the present, and he's especially drawn to images from the '50s. Even his paintings of the contemporary city evoke that "seminal time."
"Sacramento was smaller but it had a very vibrant downtown, with theaters, restaurants—there were no high-rise buildings. Today, downtown is much different. The really funky part is Midtown, to the east of downtown. Even East Sac is now very funkily gentrified."
Guyer is represented by the Solomon Dubnick Gallery, housed in a brick structure built in 1913 for the Fuller Paint and Glass Company. It's now distinguished—in life and in Guyer paintings—by the sign for the Fox and Goose Pub. He went to school with the woman who founded the Fox and Goose in 1975. "It's now owned by her daughter, who runs it. . . . I do cover the whole time spectrum."
Susan Caba, a 1997 Knight fellow, is a journalist based in St. Louis.
