Want to be inspired? Head up to the Oceanside Museum of Art!
The museum’s 2022 Artist Alliance Biennial will probably take your breath away, with its many works of outstanding art. The pieces were all created by regional artists; of about 900 entries juried, only 61 were accepted. The exhibit will continue through May 1, 2022.
As I moved through the gallery yesterday, I thought about human potential and began to feel little overwhelmed.
There’s no end to the creativity that can issue from human contemplation and imagination. Our potential is truly infinite.
But life is so very short.
It occurred to me that in one passing life, eyes can see very little–an infinitesimal fraction of the entire world and all the incredible art ever made, and that will ever or could ever be made.
Oh, to see it all, go everywhere, do everything . . .
The minutes I spent at the Oceanside Museum of Art were very sweet.
At the Heart of Life’s Journey, 2021, Cathy Carey. Oil on linen.Ascent in Yellow, 2021, Fiona Phillips. Oil and copper leaf.Marionette Puppet #4, 2020, Linda Phillips. Oil on canvas.Laguna Boys, 2022, Kimberleigh Wood. Oil on 2.5″ wood boxed panel.El Gallo Rojo, 2021, Frank Vining. Epoxy fiberglass and sculpting epoxy.Free as a Bird, 2021, Sue DeWulf. Low fire ceramic sculptural assemblage.Coming Up Roses, 2020, Roberta Dyer. Mixed media on canvas.Park Under a Golden Night, 2021, Duke Windsor. Acrylic and applied imitation gold leaf.There Goes Mom, 2020, Lisa Bebi. Acrylic and mixed media on canvas.Sick King, 2015, Kenda Francis. Mixed acrylic media on canvas.
…
I live in downtown San Diego and love to walk around with my camera! You can follow Cool San Diego Sights via Facebook or Twitter!
Dance Break Oaxaca, by Linda Anderson. Cotton, bamboo batting, textile paints, thread.
I headed to Escondido today to experience an incredible art exhibition on its final day.
Surface, Substance, Structure featured work by artists who belong to the guild California Fibers. Dozens of amazing pieces filled the galleries at the Museum of the California Center for the Arts, Escondido.
The thing about fibers is they curl and intersect and tangle and twist and naturally form beautiful complexity, even if you must look closely.
I was completely amazed by the creativity of these regional fiber artists. Innovative quilts, wire sculptures, baskets, fabric portraits and constructions–there seemed no end to the artistry their hands could produce.
Well, the exhibition is now over, so this blog is a bit late in coming. But you might be awed, or even inspired, by some of the pieces I photographed…
Surprising fabric creations awaited around every corner!Visitors to the museum were encouraged to feel the texture of these fiber art samples.SoCal Mama, by Kathy Nida. Commercial and hand-dyed fabric.Earth Vessel, by Brecia Kravolic-Logan. Reed, paper, patinaed copper, beach glass, driftwood stand, twined, glazed, netted.Small Wonders, by Charlotte Bird. Art quilt. (Microbes remain, even after a good washing!)Exploring Too, by Peggy Wiedemann. Pine needles, Irish waxed linen.Styling, by Peggy Wiedemann. Pine needles, waxed linen, rag cordage from India, old metal wheels, glass beads.Time Warp, by Lydia Tjioe Hall. Steel wire, waxed linen, cast bronze.LAVAfolds, by Cameron Taylor-Brown. Weaving photographic transfer, quilting, embroidery.Wandering the City, by Debby Weiss. Cotton, stitching, applique.
…
I live in downtown San Diego and love to walk around with my camera! You can follow Cool San Diego Sights via Facebook or Twitter!
Huge juicy hamburgers, served with precious gold, tempt the eyes of those visiting the Oceanside Museum of Art!
I said gold?
Yes!
The hamburger paintings and a sculpture, by San Diego artist Duke Windsor, are made to shine with the application of gold leaf. He was inspired by the gilt religious icons in the collection of Balboa Park’s Timken Museum. (Would that make these hamburgers secular icons?)
A black sculpture rises skyward at the entrance to the Edward J. Schwartz Federal Building in downtown San Diego. Composed of triangular steel forms, the sculpture and its sharp edges pierce the space around it. The monumental public artwork is titled Excalibur.
Excalibur was created in 1976 by Beverly Stoll Pepper, whose pieces have been exhibited and collected by major museums around the world. Beverly Pepper passed away two years ago, but her unique artistic vision continues to enrich our lives.
I walked around Excalibur recently and took these photographs. It was interesting how joined triangles, observed from different angles, produce very different images. It’s like how the larger world, composed of basic elemental structures, achieves its complexity.
The sharp, jutting steel seems to have emerged from underground. And doesn’t the sculpture look almost like folded origami?
…
This blog now features thousands of photos around San Diego! Are you curious? There’s lots of cool stuff to check out!
Here’s the Cool San Diego Sights main page, where you can read the most current blog posts. If you’re using a phone or small mobile device, click those three parallel lines up at the top–that opens up my website’s sidebar, where you’ll see the most popular posts, a search box, and more!
To enjoy future posts, you can also “like” Cool San Diego Sights on Facebook or follow me on Twitter.
An enormous, very fancy Red Shoe seems lost among the trees in a corner of UC San Diego!
Red Shoe is an unusual outdoor sculpture by Elizabeth Murray, created in 1996. It’s part of the University of San Diego Stuart Collection.
I say unusual, because it stands among eucalyptus trees and seems oddly–to me–out of place. Like a shoe from a fairy tale, dropped in a forest. But I think that was the intention!
Faceted, colored objects are scattered on the ground nearby, like fallen jewels.
The paths in this corner of the UCSD campus, by North Torrey Pines Road and Revelle College Drive, are seldom trod. By ordinary folk, that is.
…
This blog now features thousands of photos around San Diego! Are you curious? There’s lots of cool stuff to check out!
Here’s the Cool San Diego Sights main page, where you can read the most current blog posts. If you’re using a phone or small mobile device, click those three parallel lines up at the top–that opens up my website’s sidebar, where you’ll see the most popular posts, a search box, and more!
To enjoy future posts, you can also “like” Cool San Diego Sights on Facebook or follow me on Twitter.
The small mountain will rise from The Map of the Grand Canyons of La Jolla, in a plaza filled with educational artwork at Kellogg Park.
I learned about this wonderful project on Saturday during my walk along the La Jolla Shores beach boardwalk.
The sculpture will depict canyons running from Mount Soledad down deep into the Pacific Ocean. Those visiting The Map of the Grand Canyons of La Jolla Educational Plaza will be able to visualize in three dimensions what is shown in two dimensions in the large, colorful mosaic at their feet.
The Grand Canyons of La Jolla project is the work of the Walter Munk Foundation For the Oceans, which is responsible for the The Map mosaic in the plaza, plus signs and another nearby sculpture.
The Map mosaic is the plaza’s extraordinary centerpiece. It beautifully represents the local shoreline and underwater canyons in the San Diego-La Jolla Underwater Park Ecological Reserve.
Lines drawn in The Map concern ocean wave dynamics, calculated by Walter Munk, a world-renowned scientist who worked and taught for many years at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. Over a hundred sea creatures also appear in the mosaic.
Signs at one edge of The Map detail the birds, fish and other marine life one might see above or below the water off La Jolla. A second completed sculpture, near the place where the small Mount Soledad will appear, concerns the Kumeyaay in the coastal region. It also shows intertidal sea life, cast in bronze.
Should you walk down the boardwalk (honorary Walter Munk Way) at La Jolla Shores beach, make sure to visit The Map. And watch for the coming of a second small Mount Soledad!
Walter Munk developed ocean wave prediction theory.
To learn more about Walter Munk’s scientific contribution during World War II, his groundbreaking work at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, his worldwide recognition, and why surfers love him, click here.
To watch a Walter Munk Foundation video concerning The Map click here.
Read an article about the mosaic’s debut in 2020 (replacing an earlier “map” at this location) by clicking here.
…
I live in downtown San Diego and love to walk around with my camera! You can follow Cool San Diego Sights via Facebook or Twitter!
There’s a fascinating exhibition now showing at the La Jolla Historical Society’s Wisteria Cottage Gallery. San Diego artists, after viewing artifacts in the La Jolla Historical Society’s archives, have created pieces that are inspired and informed by the past. The exhibition is titled Memory Traces: Artists Transform the Archive.
I visited the gallery inside the historic Wisteria Cottage yesterday. It’s free to the public and worth the time if you’re curious about local history or the creative process–or philosophy.
According to the La Jolla Historical Society’s description here: The exhibition draws its title from a 1925 essay by Sigmund Freud, in which he explored the way remembrance functions . . . The exhibition proposes that the archives’ contemporary value may, in fact, lie in its malleability . . . for critique, for expanding understandings of experience and of history, for transformation, and the creation of new narratives…
As I walked about looking at the pieces, I could see how this world we live in is a continuum, where past, present and future are entangled and inseparable, not unlike all the moments in our own lives.
I took photos of two examples of the artwork…
Historical photo of Spanish artist Eduardo Chillida’s sculpture Our Father’s House, installed in La Jolla Village in 1989 as part of an outdoor art exhibition. A study for a larger work later installed in Guernica, Spain, honoring lives lost during the Spanish Civil War.their father’s house, by artist Joe Yorty, 2022. A wood replica with photos and newspaper clippings concerning the building, movement and destruction of local buildings. An homage to past lives, including the artist’s own father.Cloth banner with words Matinee Today that was once used at La Jolla’s historic Granada Theatre.Matinee Today, by artist Allison Wiese, 2021. Photos of material from the past being used in present life in many different ways. The past persists. Nothing ever truly goes away.
…
I live in downtown San Diego and love to walk around with my camera! You can follow Cool San Diego Sights via Facebook or Twitter!
There’s an extraordinary bronze sculpture in Encinitas at a place that overlooks the wide blue Pacific Ocean. It’s titled Humanity.
Head west on J Street until you can go no farther, then up the steps to the J Street Viewpoint. Keep your eyes open.
The beautiful sculpture was created in 2013 by Del Mar artist Maidy Morhous. It was installed in the park in 2018. The sculpture was commissioned by local filmmaker Sue Vicory of Heartland Films, whose film “One” explores human connectivity.
You can read more about this artwork’s inspiration here.
Humanity is part of the Encinitas Public Art Collection.
Look at these photos. Touch them with your eyes.
One touch forever connects us with Humanity.
…
I live in downtown San Diego and love to walk around with my camera! You can follow Cool San Diego Sights via Facebook or Twitter!
For some reason, I’ve always paused when passing Studio 13 in Balboa Park’s Spanish Village Art Center.
Perhaps it’s the word Ebullience above the front door. More likely it was the organic, seemingly infinite art that blossomed all around the place.
Over the years, I had spoken a few times to ceramic artist Sylvia Mejia, who worked in Studio 13. The first time she showed me the labyrinth she’d painted on the patio in front. The next time she showed me inside. What I found was indescribably powerful. If you’d like to see those photographs, click here.
Well, lately I’d noticed the door is shut, nobody home. And today I saw Studio 13 had been vacated. She’s moved on, I was told.
But I got one more smile. Because in the parking lot to the side of her old studio, next the Balboa Park Miniature Railroad’s fence, like an ancient living guard, one of her wonderful, whimsical sculptures still stands.
UPDATE!
Days later, I noticed the sculpture had been moved to another spot across the parking lot. It fits right in with that tree and surrounding greenery!
…
I live in downtown San Diego and love to walk around with my camera! You can follow Cool San Diego Sights via Facebook or Twitter!
The Triton Legend is made visible at UC San Diego in the form of a fountain sculpture. Triton with his trident and conch is located at the bottom of stairs on the south side of Price Center.
I passed the Triton Fountain during a recent walk and took these photographs.
The fine bronze sculpture of UCSD’s mascot was installed in 2008. It was created by artist Manuelita Brown, an alumna of the university.
I’ve photographed two other great sculptures by Manuelita Brown. One, titled Encinitas Child, you can see here. The second small sculpture titled I’ll Fly Away is here.
Triton in Greek mythology is a merman and demigod, the son of Poseidon.
A plaque near the fountain, which was off when I walked past, reads:
The Triton Legend
In Greek mythology, Triton is known as the trumpeter of the deep and son of Poseidon, god of the sea. He is represented as a merman having the upper body of a human and tail of a fish. Like Poseidon, he carries a three prong spear called a trident. However, Triton’s special attribute is the conch shell, which he blows like a trumpet to calm or raise the seas. When blown loudly, its sound is so fearsome, Triton’s rivals imagine it to be the roar of a mighty beast and take flight.
…
I live in downtown San Diego and love to walk around with my camera! You can follow Cool San Diego Sights via Facebook or Twitter!
You can easily explore Cool San Diego Sights by using the search box on my blog’s sidebar. Or click a tag! There are thousands upon thousands of photos for you to enjoy!
Cool San Diego Sights! 