Two-for-one deal
San Francisco Symphony’s new Davies After Hours series offers music lovers the perfect doubleheader. After paying as little as $15 for a seat behind the stage with a bird’s-eye view of the orchestra (the best seat in the house, as far as we’re concerned), patrons retire to a more intimate setting in the second-tier lobby to sip cocktails and listen to the eclectic sounds of such artists as experimental cellist Alex Kelly or the rock-jazz-fusion power group NTL. Tickets go on sale in August for the winter and spring seasons. 201 Van Ness Ave., S.F., 415-864-6000, sfsymphony.org

Dramatic license
Shotgun Players, in Berkeley, is the prime spot for penny-wise and environmentally minded culture vultures. It’s the first theater in the country to run on solar power, and it’s one of the best places around for reasonably priced, high-quality shows (its award-winning rendition of Beowulf just finished an off-Broadway run). Audience members pay what they can during the first week of each production (barring opening nights), and enjoy a pass-the-hat approach at all of Shotgun’s popular outdoor summer performances, held at John Hinkel Park. 1901 Ashby Ave., Berkeley, 510-841-6500, ext. 303, shotgunplayers.org

Blue-cheap art
It’s hard to predict which painters will be the next to fetch eight or nine figures at auction, but we’re bold enough to bet on three now selling in San Francisco galleries, whose canvases go for $3,000 or less but may soon command 10 times that price.

Joshua Hagler often finds inspiration in the morning paper. Working with photographs of suicide bombers or of Benazir Bhutto’s assas­sination, he first combines these images in Photoshop, then transposes them onto canvas—but that’s where the realism ends. With oil paint and intensive brushwork, Hagler distorts his visual sources to capture the psychological resonance of troubling current events. Frey Norris Gallery: 456 Geary St., S.F., 415-346-7812, freynorris.com

Catherine Courtenaye reverses a historical tradition of using fanciful flourishes to make handwriting artistic, by creating paintings that replicate calligraphic adornments from old ledgers and notebooks. Her elegant, small-scale canvases embed these anonymous embellishments in layers of luminous color, to very striking effect. Modernism Gallery: 685 Market St., Ste. 290, S.F., 415-541-0461, modernisminc.com

Mel Prest was a figurative painter for a decade before she turned to abstraction, and beneath her colorful, geometric surfaces, her surroundings are still the basis for her compo­sitions. While visiting Japan, for example, she mapped each metro stop in Tokyo onto a grid that she plotted using the 71 letters of the hiragana alphabet, spelling out the station names by connecting the grid points with fine lines of colored gouache. The work’s combination of graphic precision and throbbing colors prods viewers to think about the limits of traditional depiction. Gregory Lind Gallery: 49 Geary St., 5th Fl., S.F., 415-296-9661, gregorylindgallery.com

Cash-and-carry art
On Sketch Tuesdays, which take place the last Tuesday night of each month, some 20 local artists tote their pencils and paints to 111 Minna, a gallery and bar around the corner from SFMOMA, and spend four hours crafting new works while potential patrons drink and make conversation. The roster of participants often includes well-known talent, such as street artist Apex and San Francisco Chronicle cartoonist Paul Madonna, but the ground rules are always the same: Works go on sale the moment they’re done, irresistibly priced at $30 or less—all of which goes directly to the artists. 111 Minna St., S.F., 415-974-1719, sketchtuesdays.com