Cityscapes on Sascha Brawer

Bühlstrasse

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I had never painted a night scene, so one evening I went out to try, right around the corner from my apartment in Bern, at the intersection with Bühlstrasse.

Bern’s streetlights today are plain cool-white LEDs. Before painting, I therefore tinted the photo yellow myself to mimic the warm light of the sodium-vapor lamps that were common in the 1970s. I just liked the effect: everything appears in a strangely saturated orange; headlights blur into streaks; a storefront disappears into the shadows; a passerby crosses the scene right in the middle of this light. For me, color is the central element in this painting—even though the street doesn’t look anything like that anymore.

Prime Tower

Fri, 28 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

One evening I was walking from Zürich Hardbrücke station over to Bitwäscherei, a hackerspace, for a Swiss OpenStreetMap get-together. I was a little early, so I stopped on the bridge and stood there for a while, letting my eyes drift across the skyline. They lingered on the glass facade of Prime Tower — for a few years Switzerland’s tallest building, and about as tidy a symbol of Zürich’s prosperity as you could ask for. Its sleek, expensive panes reflected the red-and-white chimney of the waste-incineration plant next door, and the fluorescent tubes lighting the office floors cut long bright lines through the whole picture. This contrast and the geometric shapes fascinated me.

Mittelstrasse

Thu, 03 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This is Gelateria di Berna, an ice cream parlor on Mittelstrasse in Bern, a few minutes’ walk from my apartment. I painted it on a bright summer day — the kind when every table outside is taken and the line spills onto the sidewalk.

What I find interesting is the wall on the right. In reality it carries a big piece of graffiti. At first glance it looks quickly sprayed on, but it is so carefully done that it is almost certainly a commissioned work. I copied it line for line. In oil — an even slower medium — it came out a touch more precise than the original itself. That friction between an everyday format and a gallery medium is the whole point of my Memes series — this isn’t a meme, obviously, but apparently I can’t resist chasing the same clash everywhere.

Fùxīng Lù

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Fùxīng Lù is a quiet street in Shanghai’s old French Concession, all plane trees and small shops, with a coffee shop every few doors. One of them had a big glass front, and the room behind it looked nice, so I took a photo through the window with my phone and walked on.

I didn’t look at it again for years. When I finally did, going through old travel pictures, one thing jumped out: the place was full, everyone packed in around tiny tables — and half of them were staring at a phone. So was I, technically. That’s how the photo got taken.

Schaffhauserstrasse

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

After meeting a friend in Zürich one afternoon, I was walking back toward the station when I passed Kafi Freud on Schaffhauserstrasse. People were sitting outside in a bright wedge of sun, coffee cups on the little tables, and the whole scene had a warm, easy glow to it. I took a photo from across the street and painted it later.

I ended up cropping the faces out of the frame. To me that makes the picture more interesting — you still get the leaning-in, the gestures, the shape of a good conversation, without needing to know whose it is. I might turn it into a series one day: faceless people, chatting over coffee.

Shinjuku-eki

Mon, 24 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

On Unsplash I found a freely licensed photograph by Eutah Mizushima: a woman waiting on a subway platform, with a blurred background. It looked like a good opportunity to learn how to fake motion blur in oil.

I painted with two different whites — zinc white, cool and slightly gray, for the hazy background, and titanium white, warmed up with a touch of chromium yellow, for her pullover in the foreground. The photo was taken at Shinjuku Station in Tokyo, which gave me the title: “Shinjuku-eki”, Japanese for “Shinjuku Station”.