Things I didn't notice the first time

I took these photos all within a few blocks of my home. I must have walked by more than once before I really saw them.

On the front porch of a Cowper Street cottage

This dome tops the building across the street from my apartment. Sometimes the window beneath the dome is lit at night. When I researched the dome online, all I found was the Flickr page of a renter in the building, who relayed the rumor that the top-floor apartment was the residence of the building's eccentric owner. Wonder if s/he owns a telescope.

The sushi at this University Avenue restaurant is okay. I like the cranes better.

These fellows are in the front yard of a nearby residence. I find them a little disturbing.

Nanobama

John Hart & colleagues, Nanobama

These 3-D portraits are smaller than a grain of salt. Each "nanobama" is a vertical stack of about 150 million carbon nanotubes, unusually strong hollow cylinders about 1/50,000th the width of a human hair.

University of Michigan professor John Hart and his colleagues began by converting Shepard Fairey's iconic red, white and blue poster of Barack Obama to a line drawing. They shrunk the drawing and printed it on a glass plate with a laser. Then they shined ultraviolet light through the glass plate on to a silicon wafer to create a pattern on which to grow the carbon nanotubes.

View more of Hart's nano-art at www.nanobliss.com.

Art in the streets

The Palo Alto Festival of the Arts was a great way to spend a Saturday: enjoying the sun, strolling down the middle of University Avenue, looking at the work of talented artists, and indulging in the sort of food you only eat at street fairs.

Fried artichoke hearts with mayonnaise, fried calamari, kettle corn, skewers of grilled meat. (Where else could you walk around chomping on a stick of teriyaki chicken without feeling self-conscious?)
















One block was set aside for Italian street painting, and a vivid patchwork of ephemeral art emerged.




































The City from Grizzly Peak, by Tom Killion

I took home this wonderful woodcut print and its mate; together the pair gives a panoramic view of San Francisco, the Golden Gate Bridge, and the Bay. The artist, Tom Killion, draws on the techniques of early 19th century Japanese ukiyo-ë landscape masters as well as those of early 20th century American and European wood-engraving and book illustration.

Working from his own sketches made on site, Killion carves the images onto blocks made of cherry, linoleum or other materials, using Japanese hand tools. Sometimes a different block is made for each color. Other times, a block is printed with a light color; then parts are carved away and another color is used, overprinting the first.

I enjoyed talking with Killion at his festival booth and looking at his samples demonstrating the complex process by which the layers of color are added to the print. It's wonderful to have a piece of art in your home that you enjoy looking at every day, and it's even more meaningful to have met the artist and listened to him or her describe the creative process.

This is me, blogging

"Rhymes with Orange," 8/22/07

Thank you, Hilary Price, for a great laugh.

This is a quirky, catch-you-off-guard funny comic strip. Visit her Web site to see more.

Insulted by Shakespeare

"The famous Chandos portrait, the subject of which, although commonly assumed to be William Shakespeare, has never been definitely identified." (Wikipedia)

I've customized my Google page so that each time I visit, I get an insult courtesy of Shakespeare. I don' t know what it says about me that I continue to enjoy this.

My favorite so far: "You shall stifle in your own report, and smell of calumny." (from Measure for Measure, Act 2, Scene 4)

Special starlight

"Starlight Over the Rhone," Vincent van Gogh
Musee d'Orsay, Paris


...Shall we look up now at stars in Winter
And call them always sweeter friends
Because this story of a Mother and a Child
Never is told with the stars left out?

Is it a Holy Night now when a child issues
Out of the dark and the unknown
Into the starlight?

...Shall all wanderers over the earth, all homeless ones,
All against whom doors are shut and words spoken --
Shall these find the earth less strange tonight?
Shall they hear news, a whisper on the night wind?
"A Child is born." "The meek shall inherit the earth."

...Shall a quiet dome of stars high over
Make signs and a friendly language
Among all nations?

Shall they yet gather with no clenched fists at all,
And look into each other's faces and see eye to eye,
And find ever new testaments of man as a sojourner
And a toiler and a brother of fresh understandings?

-- From "Special Starlight," by Carl Sandburg, American poet, 1878-1967
The Complete Poems of Carl Sandburg, c. 2003

Striking new San Francisco museum (4 of 4)

Andy Goldsworthy, "Drawn Stone," 2005
de Young Museum















Cornelia Parker, "Anti-Mass," 2005


De Young Museum, Golden Gate Park
San Francisco
17th-20th century American art and art of the native Americans, Asia and the Pacific

Part 4 of 4
Selected works

Andy Goldsworthy, “Drawn Stone,” 2005

As you walk toward the main entrance of the de Young Museum, you could easily overlook a slim crack running down the center of the pavement. The crack stretches to a large squared chunk of stone, splits the stone in two, and continues into a courtyard, where it branches off in half a dozen crooked paths to break through other stone blocks.

This arrangement is a commissioned work by British artist Andy Goldsworthy. When Goldsworthy learned that the chosen material for the piece was Yorkshire sandstone (which also surrounds the museum), he became intrigued by the way that the stone splits.. “The crack and the hole have been an important recurring feature in my art for a long time,” Goldsworthy comments in a recorded audio guide to the museum. “They are windows into the stone, or a release of the energies inside the stone. They are a way of both looking in and looking out of the stone.”

Cracks and fissures have particular meaning in the San Francisco Bay area, and in light of the deYoung’s history, Goldsworthy notes. He likes the idea that visitors don’t immediately recognize his work as art. “People see it and probably think it’s a fault in the building, which I adore. It’s so opposite what you would normally get in front of a museum.”


Cornelia Parker, “Anti-Mass,” 2005

This hanging sculpture is made from charred fragments of a black southern Baptist church destroyed by arsonists.

The piece dominates the room with its ominous presence. Even before I read about the work, I thought it looked like an arrested explosion.

“Mass” refers to both the amount of matter in an object and to a religious ritual. A placard near the he piece states that the installation is meant to evoke “both the lost church and the bodily presence of the congregation through an absence more powerful than any figurative image.”

Art in your neighborhood

Storefront Art That's Turning Heads

By Jessica Dawson
Special to The Washington Post
Saturday, August 19, 2006; C01

Until Sept. 20, a trio of massive concrete-and-steel heads occupies a vacant storefront in the heart of Logan Circle's condominium and retail district. The heads are a striking art installation called "Memorial (Collapse)" by the South African-born artist Ledelle Moe. You may visit anytime, day or night. And you should.

Eerie exhibit: Ledelle Moe's concrete-and-steel "Memorial (Collapse)." (From The Artist)

I wonder why this sort of exhibit doesn't happen more often in vacant retail space. It would seem to benefit everyone involved, especially in the case of a massive work like this one. Perhaps it only works in an urban setting like Logan Circle, where there is a fair amount of pedestrian traffic.