Five years ago I explored the San Diego River Garden in Mission Valley. Read about my visit here.
The community park, full of native vegetation and art, was developed by the San Diego River Park Foundation. It’s no longer listed on the foundation’s website. For all intents and purposes, it appears to have been abandoned.
I noticed, about a week ago, that people can still enter the old River Garden and walk about on its trails. So that’s what I did.
As you can see, the human-made parts of the park are fading away. Signs, planters and art are weathered and are slowly disintegrating.
While works of the human hand gradually pass away, the forces of nature persist. Plants, trees and natural life grow, renew, overtake.
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A new exhibition has opened at the Timken Museum of Art in Balboa Park. It’s titled Poetic Portraits: Allegory and Identity in 16th Century Europe. Read all about it here.
Visitors to the museum have the opportunity to see the work of notable Renaissance artists, including Sofonisba Anguissola, whose painting Portrait of Giovanni Battista Caselli, on loan from the Museo Nacional del Prado in Madrid, is being displayed in the United States for the first time.
Lovers of fine art and art history will certainly enjoy this exhibition. They’ll also treasure the excellent booklet concerning the artists that is freely handed out at the front desk. It explains how both allegory (symbolism) and identity (descriptive details) combine in the painting of these portraits. This results in a poetic blending of abstract ideals and visual reality.
To most of us here in the 21st century, the people in the portraits are complete strangers. (A few aren’t even positively identified by experts.) But one can see how, compared to flatter, blander pre-Renaissance art, these portraits have assumed a more definite personality.
Gazing at each portrait, I found myself wondering: what had the subject’s true personality been like? The eyes and facial expressions might provide a hint.
The world-class Timken Museum of Art is always free to the public. The exhibition continues through March 29, 2026.
Check out the museum’s website for everything you need to know here.
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In San Diego’s Civic Center Plaza, near the Civic Theatre Ticket Office, you’ll find these words:
Blooming is the wild body unmarred by the limits of this world
Its petals temporary but you’d never know it
The two lines were written by Paola Capó-García, San Diego Poet Laureate 2025-2027. A special City of San Diego webpage provides her biography.
Paola Capó-García lives in North Park. Her accomplishments and accolades as educator, author and journalist are numerous.
The thought-provoking words in Civic Center Plaza are actually the conclusion of her poem Wild, which you can read here. Her poem explains the difference between blooming and blossoming.
Are you blooming?
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I post new blogs pretty often. If you like discovering new things, bookmark coolsandiegosights.com and swing on by occasionally!
I live in downtown San Diego and love to walk around with my camera! You can follow Cool San Diego Sights via Facebook or X.
Today is the 238th anniversary of the drafting of the Constitution of the United States. September 17th was the date in 1787 when delegates to the Constitutional Convention signed the historic document in Philadelphia.
The City of San Diego has issued an official Proclamation that celebrates Constitution Week. I was fortunate to see it close up!
The City of San Diego Proclamation, signed by Mayor Todd Gloria, includes the following words:
…celebrating Constitution Week serves as an important reminder of the historic rights, privileges and responsibilities the Constitution affords us…
…Constitution Week commemorates the week the Constitution was signed and delivered to the Continental Congress. It laid the foundation for the birth of a new nation and became one of the most significant chapters in United States history…
…the Constitution lays out liberties like freedom, opportunity, and rule of law…
As a writer and individual who loves to create, I cherish freedom.
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I post new blogs pretty often. If you like discovering new things, bookmark coolsandiegosights.com and swing on by occasionally!
I live in downtown San Diego and love to walk around with my camera! You can follow Cool San Diego Sights via Facebook or X.
During my walk through Balboa Park today, I came upon a quietly smiling gentleman in a lawn chair with a poster in front of him. I had stumbled upon the Listening Project.
Joshua was very welcoming as I asked him about his Listening Project. He said his only intention was to listen to people if they decide to engage. He’ll listen politely to absolutely anything you might say.
Joshua believes everybody needs to be heard, and that listening is a gift we give to other people. Our listening lets people know that they matter.
Our listening also helps us to grow as human beings.
Actually hearing and considering the thoughts of other people, I have to agree, is an essential part of being thoughtful ourselves–no matter what that other person might say. Nobody is exactly alike. We are all fallible, complex and have our own unique life experiences.
In these days of social media, which seems to reward division, deceit, name calling and unabashed rudeness, polite, thoughtful one-on-one listening seems more important than ever.
Sadly, it also seems we human beings can be a bit self-absorbed. Sometimes when we converse we are more concerned about what we will say, rather than what the other person is saying. We talk over each other. I can be guilty of this, myself.
Joshua listens confidentially and doesn’t judge. As his website explains: The idea for the Listening Project first came to me around three years ago. The idea was very simple: set up a couple of chairs in public places and offer people the opportunity to speak uninterrupted about anything they wished for five or ten minutes, with the promise that if they did so I would really listen.
Does he have some ulterior motive or hidden agenda? Merely this: I believe that through listening and connecting we can: shed fears or anxieties we hold about reaching out to ‘strangers’; cast off the stereotypes we live with; build bridges across the boundaries that we have created and which divide us; reduce the loneliness that many of us feel; and gain insight into what it might take to create broader ‘communities’ in our lives.
Yes, Joshua is out of the ordinary. In a very, very good way!
He wouldn’t mind if others followed in his footsteps, but he’s very humble about his “experiment” and wishes only that people choose their own path.
Are you curious about the Listening Project? I urge you to check out its website here!
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I post new blogs pretty often. If you like discovering new things, bookmark coolsandiegosights.com and swing on by occasionally!
I live in downtown San Diego and love to walk around with my camera! You can follow Cool San Diego Sights via Facebook or X.
In the past few days, I’ve spotted autonomous Waymo cars navigating streets in San Diego. Bankers Hill is where I saw two of the cars, to be exact. Both had drivers behind the steering wheel. I had my camera at the ready this afternoon to capture the above photo. Yes, there is a driver in there.
Waymo is the company that has those driverless autonomous taxis operating up in San Francisco. You hail them with your phone and input the destination.
Here in San Diego, and other test cities, Waymo cars are being driven through certain neighborhoods in order to gather data, refine maps, and learn about the peculiarities of different places. Here’s an article that thoroughly describes the Waymo tests in San Diego. They began very recently.
I can see how many people are wary of driverless cars. The concept is revolutionary and still pretty new. One hears of glitches.
I suppose, however, that at some point in the future, driverless cars will be ubiquitous in every city around the world and taken for granted, just as other groundbreaking technologies eventually become the norm. I grew up with a rotary dial telephone . . . and an astounding invention: the electronic push button calculator!
We live in exciting, uncertain times when technology is taking gigantic leaps forward. Artificial intelligence, chips in heads, advancing robotics, virtual reality worlds… Where will all of this take us? How will this change us?
I wonder. Will the automation of practically everything make life more fulfilling?
I guess humanity will take the journey and find out…
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I post new blogs pretty often. If you like discovering new things, bookmark coolsandiegosights.com and swing on by occasionally!
I live in downtown San Diego and love to walk around with my camera! You can follow Cool San Diego Sights via Facebook or X.
San Diego artist James E. Watts will be hosting an art show inside his downtown studio this coming Sunday, September 22, 2024. Visitors will have the opportunity to be transported by his wonderful Portal to Heaven!
I swung by his studio this morning and was able to sneak a look at his completed Portal to Heaven project myself.
An astonishing wall appears like a puzzle piece sky full of clouds. Each of the 105 hand sewn clouds, he explains, gather and radiate orgone life energy like a battery! Stand at the heavenly portal and feel its energy!
I blogged about this ambitious project last December. You can read more about it here.
After James showed me the amazing Portal to Heaven, I turned about and saw how he’s creating bunches of apples. They’re in groups of five. He calls them all together the Gates of Hell!
The apples are of different sizes, just as sins are. Would you take a bite of these apples? Perhaps a little one?
James Watts’ studio never ceases to amaze me. Creativity fills it wall to wall, and every time I visit it seems there’s a new, fantastic project.
James loves ideas, theories, philosophy, literature . . . different ways of seeing this world. With his art he inspires, teaches. He explained during our talk today that he’s a teacher without a classroom.
You’ll note he also has a big smile.
Next he showed me what he called a sense board. This particular work of art, which is titled Six Senses, actively interacts with a person using sound, smell, touch, taste, sight and intuition! Should you attend his art show next Sunday, perhaps you can try it out!
Interested, yet?
James E. Watts will host the 100 Clouds 100 Apples art show this coming Sunday, from 12 to 8 pm. His studio is located in the heart of downtown at 1046 Seventh Avenue.
Lovers of art just might find heaven!
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Thanks for visiting Cool San Diego Sights!
I post new blogs pretty often. If you like discovering new things, bookmark coolsandiegosights.com and swing on by occasionally!
I live in downtown San Diego and love to walk around with my camera! You can follow Cool San Diego Sights via Facebook or X.
Today is Arbor Day. It’s a day when we think about the future and plant trees.
Early last year I published a very short story that mentions Arbor Day. Dale’s Tree is the title. You might enjoy this touching, slightly philosophical tale.
Have an excellent weekend, and stay tuned for more photographs from walks all around San Diego!
(The above photograph was taken in Balboa Park, as I walked down a path from Golden Hill into the Bennington Memorial Oak Grove. The place inspired my story.)
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Thanks for visiting Cool San Diego Sights!
I post new blogs pretty often. If you like discovering new things, bookmark coolsandiegosights.com and swing on by occasionally!
I live in downtown San Diego and love to walk around with my camera! You can follow Cool San Diego Sights via Facebook or X (formerly known as Twitter)!
The Art of Science is a photographic exhibit that explores the intersection of art and science. Curious eyes can view this cool exhibit inside the Sally T. WongAvery Library at UC San Diego, and at the Natural History Museum in Balboa Park.
The above fluorescent image of a pine tree stem cross-section was taken using a microscope. A stem that is scientifically examined might be a natural object, but like any art the resulting image is human-created, and can stimulate complex thought and emotion.
Many would say the above image is beautiful.
Do you consider it to be beautiful?
Why or why not?
Aren’t all things in this world potentially beautiful?
Is beauty entirely in the eye (or mind) of the beholder?
The Art of Science presents several intriguing images that appear simultaneously familiar and strange.
Here’s a web page that describes the exhibit, including: Now in its third year, the Library’s Art of Science contest celebrates the beauty that can emerge during scientific research at UC San Diego and beyond. This year, librarians and staff pre-selected items from the Research Data Collections repository. From these selected images, winners were chosen by the campus and the broader San Diego community via online voting.
More samples from the exhibit…
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Thanks for visiting Cool San Diego Sights!
I post new blogs pretty often. If you like discovering new things, bookmark coolsandiegosights.com and swing on by occasionally!
I live in downtown San Diego and love to walk around with my camera! You can follow Cool San Diego Sights via Facebook or X (formerly known as Twitter)!
Inspired artist James Watts works in downtown San Diego. His studio is a fantasyland jammed wall to wall with amazing creativity. I like to swing on by occasionally to see what he’s up to!
Having finished his whittled fingers and toes project, James is now sewing together one hundred pillow-like clouds. Not ordinary clouds, mind you, but ones that gather and radiate orgone life energy like a battery!
James, whose creativity has no limit, intends to use the finished clouds to form a portal–an art installation on a wall where people can experience heavenly orgone energy. The carefully handsewn clouds are made of canvas, filled with steel wool and cotton, and painted in twenty shades of blue. It’s the same canvas the artist used for his fantastic Jekyll and Hyde project.
James explained that artists are like alchemists. They transform otherwise ordinary materials into things of immense value. Of course, he’s exactly right.
His unique visual art stirs up complex, subtle ideas. His surprising art inspires those who gaze upon it with an open heart and mind.
James Watts has also painted clouds–like ancient wisdom–on scrolls!
Check out his whittled fingers and toes, the cool project that preceded his clouds…
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Thanks for visiting Cool San Diego Sights!
I post new blogs pretty often. If you like discovering new things, bookmark coolsandiegosights.com and swing on by occasionally!
I live in downtown San Diego and love to walk around with my camera! You can follow Cool San Diego Sights via Facebook or X (formerly known as Twitter)!
Cool San Diego Sights! 