Mission artist animates green utility boxes with a flock of birds

Read Mission Local often?

Help grow our newsroom during end-of-year fundraising, joining the hundreds of San Franciscans who support us by donating below.

Chestnut-backed chickadees, yellow warblers and other feathered birds have landed this winter on the unassuming green utility boxes along South Van Ness Avenue and Bryant Street in the Mission.

The 20 feathered friends are the creation of Claudio Talavera-Ballón, a Mission-based Peruvian painter sponsored by the nonprofit Paint the Void sponsored to paint 10 Mission utility boxes, part of a project to remake 250 utility boxes across San Francisco.

It’s an effort to color the utility boxes that store infrastructure for nearby traffic lights across the city. Elsewhere, dozens of artists have covered the “municipal green” boxes with pandas, a girl on the swing, and a naughty astronaut. 

Talavera-Ballón’s flock, all Bay Area species, can be seen at almost every intersection on South Van Ness between 14th and 22nd streets. In the last two months, they’ve become fixtures of the Mission. 

Some birds visit their own portraits. When he started working on the tiny chestnut-backed chickadee at Bryant and 17th streets, Talavera-Ballón said, “I started seeing a lot of [chestnut-backed chickadees] in the Mission.”

He chose “the most colorful” birds to depict. It took him 10 eight-hour days to finish the renderings — sometimes longer if he needed to erase and redraw the eye. The latter, he said, is the key to bringing a bird to life. “If you see the eyes of the bird, the birds are watching you,” said Talavera-Ballón.

The yellow warbler at the corner of South Van Ness and 22nd is a migratory bird with yellow and black stripes that travels between California and South America. When they were in town, they congregated in the large pomelo tree in Talavera-Ballón’s backyard.

And now, they are gone. “Somebody cut the tree,” he explained. Afterwards, the birds, which are important predators of pests, never returned to his backyard. 

“Everything is in concern of extinction,” said Talavera-Ballón, who chose birds as his subject partly to raise awareness about the climate, pollution and animals. 

Plus, “everybody likes birds,” he said. 

Turns out he was right — the 20 birds got zero bad reviews, a rarity in San Francisco as far as anything goes.

He had an audience of onlookers while he painted. He remembered three little boys of nearly identical faces and different ages who watched him with their mouths open and their heads tilted to the side 

When he worked on the utility box at South Van Ness and 14th, a young lady hugged him, cried like a child and thanked him over and over, said Talavera-Ballón. She said the bird — either a black phoebe or a western wood pewee — reminded her of her father, and “You don’t know what the bird means to me.”