Pete Doolittle, the San Francisco artist known for his ubiquitous paintings on salvaged panes of glass, died “peacefully, and very unexpectedly” on Thursday, Jan. 2, according to a social media post shared by his longtime partner Claudia Nicolas Pierce.
Doolittle, 47, was a stalwart of the Lower Haight, where he could be spotted selling his pieces on Divisadero and hanging out at Noc Noc. “I often joked I was shacked up with the f—king mayor, because wherever we went, everyone knew his name,” Pierce wrote in the post breaking the news.
Doolittle painted on old panes of glass, which he salvaged from construction sites and dumpsters. His recurring motifs — highly stylized robots, bees, and dogs rendered in thick black lines and saturated colors — formed a self-contained universe , one that peered out from between the gaps of window frames hung all over the Lower Haight…