Rain: More Rain (February 25-26)

We got another 1.4 inches of rain on February 25-26. It drizzled most of the night on the 25th. After a lull in the morning on the 26th, we got a good downpour. That brings our total for the 2013-2014 rain year to 15.25 inches, although some locations in Santa Rosa have had as much as two or three inches less than that. We are still well below normal (nearly 12 inches below normal), but every little bit helps, and more rain is forecast in the coming two to three days, with the bulk expected to come tomorrow, the 28th.

[Update: Overnight (on the night of the 27th and into the 28th, we got more rain and it was very windy, but I found only 0.6 inches of rain in the rain gauge in the morning--much less than the howling last night suggested I'd find. Still, I'm not complaining. That brings us to 15.85 inches at my house, although the online station I most frequently monitor for Santa Rosa is reporting only 12.85 inches. Normally, our totals are fairly close.]

[Update: By the end of the 28th, we had had 0.8 inches, which brings the total to 16.05 inches.]

The Cocktail Glass Collection: The 500 Club, San Francisco

I found myself walking along Valencia St. in San Francisco yesterday, winding my way back to my car  after an appointment--a lot of interesting shops there. I walked a few blocks on 17th St. on my way back toward Dolores Park. At the corner of 17th and Guerrero, I spied The 500 Club, apparently a well-known dive bar, judging from Internet comments I found. I photographed the sign out front to add to my Cocktail Glass Collection--a collection of photos of the martini glass signs in front of bars I began last year (not very seriously--I just enjoy seeing good examples of variations on a theme). This one actually has two martini glasses incorporated into the sign--a large one in neon and other lights perched on top and a smaller all-neon glass at the bottom. Both have skewered cherries.

Click here to see it lit up at night--the top half anyway.

To see others in this series of photographs, click on the "cocktail glass collection" label. 

Wines I'm Making: 2012 Cabernet Bottled (February 21, 2014)

I bottled our 2012 Cabernet Sauvignon/Cabernet Franc today, putting eight gallons of wine into newly washed and sanitized bottles. From the tastes I got while siphoning the wine, it's turned out very nicely. In particular, it's got more ripe fruit flavors than in some past years. I won't be able to truly judge the wine until it's settled down and I can sit down with a bottle over a meal, but I'm hopeful that we've made another good batch. Now it's time to design a label for this wine, but also for our 2013 rosé (from Sangiovese), as well as the hard cider we bottled on December 23 last year. I need to hurry. The cider is quickly disappearing.

Plants I'm Growing: First Blooms--Golden Currant and Two-toned Daffodils

First blooms in 2014 on the two-toned daffodils in the front garden on February 18. The golden current (Ribes aureum) in the back garden began blooming on February 17.

[Update: The dwarf flowering peach in the garden began blooming this year on February 21. The dwarf nectarine began blooming on February 27.]

Art I'm Making: Untitled Collage No. 29 (February 18, 2014)

I finished another new collage recently. This one is something of a departure for me because it includes a found object--a numeral three printed on a slip of white paper. It was the wrapper around a bundle of silverware at one of downtown Santa Rosa's brew pubs (The Third St. Ale Works). Normally I don't use found objects because I don't trust them. They tend to fade or yellow, but this one seemed relative safe. It's printed on plain paper in a single color--black--and black tends to hold up. Otherwise, I've again used paper painted with acrylic paints, along with mono-printed elements made with acrylics on paper as the raw materials for the composition, although this one also includes a couple of lines in graphite as well. In the photo here, the lower section looks black, perhaps, but it's actually a deep indigo. Only the numeral is black.

For more, use the Art I'm Making label at right.

Places I'm Visiting: San Francisco Maritime Museum (February 17, 2014)

I made a brief stop at San Francisco's Maritime Museum recently, where Polk St. meets the Bay, in the city's Aquatic Park Historic District, part of the San Francisco Maritime National Historical Park, which includes the park area, the Maritime Museum, a visitor's center in the Argonaut Hotel building, a library and research facility, and a number of historic ships moored nearby. It had been years since I'd been to the museum, which I remembered mostly for some extraordinary ship models long housed there. I arrived only about 20 minutes before closing, having been in the area on other business, but it was enough time to get a taste of the rather startlingly beautiful murals on the interior walls of the museum building, designed by William Mooser Jr. and William Mooser III, and originally built as a bathhouse in the Art Deco style. The bathhouse and its museum were shut down for several years for renovation, but the building appears to have re-opened recently. The murals have been cleaned. They glow with color.

The bathhouse was begun in 1936 and completed in 1939. The fanciful aquatic murals inside are by Hilaire Hiler (1898-1966), known as an artist, but also as a psychologist, a color theorist, and a jazz musician. He was an author as well. His 1942 book Color Harmony and Pigments cast problems of color in art in psychological terms rather than in terms of physics and the physiology of perception. He lived in Paris before WWII and again in his later years. He died there in 1966.

The decorations, the bathhouse, and the park were WPA projects. I can't imagine how I missed the murals in the past, but they appear to have been covered with a layer of grime and the old displays in the museum obscured them.

Today it's possible to enjoy their bright colors and flowing lines again. I spent my short time in the main room photographing details. There is a picture everywhere you look. It's projects like this one that I think of when I hear people complain about too much government, about excessive government spending, about government intruding into spheres of activity best left to private enterprise. The WPA put people to work who needed work, and many of the WPA's projects created art of enduring beauty, facilities of lasting appeal. Generations of San Franciscans and visitors to the city have enjoyed the park and the museum for nearly 80 years now. Although the museum building itself appears to have had something of a checkered history (having been used as a casino and an army facility, among other things), ultimately it has proved a worthwhile spending of taxpayer money. I, for one, am delighted it's there. Seeing the murals was thrilling. Some forms of government intrusion, if this is intrusion, seem greatly to be celebrated.

I hope to make another visit soon to explore the rest of the building. Hiler's "Prismatarium," a color wheel illustrating his color theories and conceived of on the pattern of a planetarium, is on the ceiling of one of the other rooms in the building. In its coherent design and decorations, there is something about the bathhouse that put me in mind of Gaudi's Casa Batllo, in Barcelona. There's much to be seen in the rest of the museum, on the historic ships, and in the visitor's center, but it was worth the trip just to get a brief view of the murals before closing.

Boks I'm Reading: The Lives of the Muses

Francine Prose's book The Lives of the Muses (Perennial 2003, but originally published in hardcover by Harper-Collins in 2002) is now more than ten years old. I've owned a copy for many years, but read only one or two of the nine segments when I first acquired the book. I'm happy to have now read it from cover to cover. Subtitled Nine Women and the Artists They Inspired, the book looks at Hester Thrale, Alice Liddel, Elizabeth Siddal, Lou Andreas-Salomé, Gala Dali, Lee Miller, Charis Weston, Suzanne Farrell, and Yoko Ono and the relationships of these women to the men they inspired--the writers Dr. Johnson, Lewis Carroll, Rainer Maria Rilke; Nietsche; Freud; the painters Gabriel Rosetti and Salvador Dali; the photographers Edward Weston and Man Ray (although Man Ray was also a painter); a choreographer (George Balanchine); and a musician (John Lennon). There are more than nine men in the list because at least one of these women--Lou Andreas-Salome--was a "serial muse," as Prose puts it.

In her introduction, Prose looks briefly at the classical muses, what it has meant to be a muse in more Earthly terms since then, and specifically at the notion of inspiration in the arts. She admits that artistic inspiration remains somewhat mysterious, but points out that we are stubbornly curious about the genesis of art anyway. Again in her afterward, she attempts to find some common threads in the stories she has told. In the end, however, I feel the book is best read as a collection of nine essays about specific relationships without trying too hard to extract broad conclusions about musedom, and each of the nine essays reads well as an independent piece of writing. The essays about Lee Miller and Man Ray and about Suzanne Farrell and George Balanchine were of special interest to me--perhaps because in these two cases both the muses were themselves artists of importance, and, in the case of the choreographer and his muse, the love seems to have been particularly deep, the relationship between artist and muse particularly close, although it never became sexual. Recommended.

Plants I'm Growing: First Blooms--Yellow Daffodils

I belatedly report that our yellow daffodils began to bloom on February 8--tentatively at first, in the heavy rain, but they are fully open now that the rain has stopped and the sun is out. The yellow daffodils began blooming on February 18 in 2013, February 15 in 2012, February 2 in 2011, and on February 5 in 2009, so this seems a fairly typical date. I photographed them last night, still with water on them from the rain.  

Rain: From One Extreme to the Other (February 9, 2014)

After a long drought, it finally started to rain last Thursday and the skies seem intent on making up for lost time. Following the 5.7 inches I reported yesterday, we've had an additional 3.75 inches as of 1:00PM today, Sunday the 9th. That brings our 2013-2014 total to 13.05 inches, still well below normal, but remarkable considering that a week ago we'd had only 3.6 inches since July. In other words, we've had 9.45 inches in the past three days--and it's still pouring.

[As of Monday, February 10, at noon, the rain has stopped for the time being. Since last reporting we accumulated another 0.65 inches, bringing the total to 13.7 niches for the 2013-2014 rain year at this location in Santa Rosa. The storm thus brought us just over 10 inches of precipitation in total.]

[A few more dribbles later added 0.15 inches, buying the total now to 13.85 inches (as of February 19).]

Music I'm Listening To: Hélène Grimaud with the San Francisco Symphony, conducted by Lionel Bringuier (February 7, 2014)

I had the pleasure of attending the February 7 San Francisco Symphony concert with guest conductor Lionel Bringuier and pianist Hélène Grimaud. The program opened with Grimaud at the piano to perform the Brahms Piano Concerto No. 1. After intermission, Bringuier led the Symphony in  Métaboles, by Henri Dutilleux, and then Ravel's La Valse. Bringuier, now associated with the Tonhalle Orchestra in Zurich and formerly with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, was entirely new to me. I'd never heard his name before. He took the first movement of the Brahms concerto rather more slowly at first than I'm used to, but not so slowly as to lose the flow of things. Other parts of the performance seemed to be on the verge of getting out of hand. In places, the conductor let the orchestra overwhelm the piano a little, although Grimaud's playing was big--almost brash (although always precise). Still, I enjoyed hearing the concerto, a very familiar composition but one I'd never heard live before, and Mr. Bringuier seemed to have things very much in hand in the second half of the program. Bringuier is one to keep an eye on.

Ms. Grimaud, from what I've read about her, is something of a maverick. I haven't heard enough of her recordings to have a real sense of her style, but on stage she seemed the no-nonsense sort--both in her dress (wearing a simple knitted top in silver and flared satin pants in a warm silvery grey rather than something more flamboyant) and in her approach to the music. The impression she gave was of being simultaneously focused and overflowing with energy. She rewarded a very appreciative audience with an encore, but didn't say what it was. I questioned several ushers and a couple of the musicians on stage during intermission, but no one recognized the piece. One of the bass players suggested it might have been something by Scriabin….

Henri Dutilleux is a fairly obscure composer, but one I've always had a fondness for, mainly because of his Cello Concerto (in part owing to a wonderful old EMI recording I have of it with Rostropovich on the cello, paired with Lutoslawski's concerto for the same instrument). Dutilleux's highly abstract music always seems to reflect a much greater interest in texture, time, and timbre than in melody or harmony. Although the program notes for the concert emphasize his interest in musical structure and forms, I suspect he was motivated in a significant way by the sheer joy of experimenting with sound. He seems to paint with sound. I find it easy to imagine his music in the visual language of someone like Kandinsky. Métaboles was typical in that sense. It was a delight to listen to--to listen to in the way that you listen to sounds like frogs in the night, rain on the roof, waves against the shore, the clicking of a cricket, or the tinkling of a wind chime--with your attention attuned to the quality of the sound as much as to the direction it's going.

The concert ended with what seemed an impeccable rendition of La Valse.

Photo of Mr. Bringuier courtesy of the San Francisco Symphony (uncredited); photo of Hélene Grimaud by Mat Hennek, courtesy of Deutsche Grammophon. 

Art I'm Making: More Collages (February 6, 2014)

The day before yesterday I turned to my paints again, eager to try out a new color I bought in the wonderful Sennelier acrylic line, this one called "Warm Grey." I covered a few sheets of paper with the color and some other pale tones--the ones they call "Parchment" and "Titan Buff" among them. I doodled a little with a graphite stick. Later I got out "Prussian Blue Hue" (This one from Graham rather than Sennelier), and printed a few more sheets of paper from a plate of glass and used some of these mono-printed sheets to print on other sheets of paper. Armed with all this new raw material, I quickly put together three new collages that I'm rather pleased with. I really like the Sennelier colors and the effects I've been achieving by printing onto paper using mono-printed elements. These new collages have a rather different feel from some of the others I've done, but I'm pleased with them.

Rain: More Rain (February 6, 2014)

Rain starting late yesterday afternoon and continuing through the night has given us nearly an inch of new rain (0.90 inches at my house as of 9:00AM on February 6). It continues to mist and drizzle. Rain is in the forecast for the next three days. I hope it continues. I've heard predictions of as much as five inches in the coming days. That would be wonderful. Even so, it would leave us well below normal. We'll see.

[Update: It's continued to rain--at times, quite hard. Checking the rain gauge today, February 8, at 5:00PM, we've added 5.7 inches since I last reported a total (of 3.6 inches). So, we are now at 9.3 inches for the 2013-2014 rain year--and it's still raining. That leaves us more than 13 inches below normal, but it's a big improvement.]

Plants I'm Growing: First Blooms--Pluot "Dapple Dandy," Flowering Plum, Daphne Odorata

I noticed the first open buds today on the large Daphne odorata behind the house. The plant has done poorly lately. Inexplicably, about half the plant turned brown and dried up last summer. Water wasn't the problem, or the whole plant would have withered. It remains a mystery, but I'm happy to see flowers on the part of the plant that has survived. The Daphne bloomed on January 2 in 2013, which was quite early. The plant bloomed on February 7, 2012, January 21, 2011, and January 19, 2010.

On February 3, the first flowers appeared on the Pluot "Dapple Dandy" (above) and the pink flowering plum (Prunus blireana) behind the house, although, following the pattern of recent years, the latter has few remaining buds on it. The sparrows, juncos, and House Finches in the yard like to eat the flowers before they open, presumably for the nectar within. They remove virtually every bud on branches stout enough to perch on. The plum first bloomed on February 17 in 2009, February 4 in 2011, February 2, in 2012, and February 15, in 2013, so this is a fairly typical date (I don't have a record for 2010). "Dapple Dandy" first bloomed on February 5 in 2009, February 15 in 2010, February 4 in 2011, and February 23 in 2013. I can't find a record for "Dapple Dandy" for 2012.

 

Rain: Finally Something Worthy of the Name (February 2, 2014)

Last night and today we finally had a little rain--the first of substance in many weeks. At my house, we got 0.7 inches. That's not enough on its own to make a big difference, but any amount is welcome at this stage. Today's precipitation follows 0.05 inches a few days earlier--an almost negligible sprinkle. Still, the recent rain brings our total for the 2013-2014 rain year to 3.60 inches, which is an improvement, although that still leaves us 17.8 inches below normal for this time of year (21.43 inches). We desperately need more.

Wines I'm Making: 2013 Cabernet Racked and Sulfited (January 31, 2014)

I finally racked and sulfited the 2013 Cabernet, although the malolactic fermentation doesn't appear to have gone to completion. I tested the wine twice using a paper chromatography kit. The fermentation looks like it went about halfway. Nearly two months had passed and I kept the wine warm with an electric blanket, but there is still some malic acid in the wine. It seemed safest to move on, though, given the time, so I racked the wine off the gross lees (which can be seen left behind in the fermentation vessel here) and sulfited the wine lightly, to about 49ppm. I need to look into the long-term implications of an incomplete malolactic fermentation. Live and learn, as they say. It's now time to bottle the 2012 wine, which I recently gave a final racking.

Music I'm Listening To: Alexander Barantschik and Friends at the Green Music Center

Last Thursday I had the pleasure of attending another San Francisco Symphony concert at the Green Music Center in Rohnert Park. This was an intimate concert with a focus on the violin. There were only 23 performers on stage--all strings--for most of the concert. I hadn't been especially looking forward to this one, but it turned out to be a lot of fun. The concert opened with a crisp performance of the familiar Mozart Divertimento in F Major (K. 138), one of those fairly early Mozart pieces marked by a lively earnestness. Tired at the end of a long day, it was just the thing I needed. Comfort music.

Having scanned the program quickly, I was surprised by the Mendelssohn violin concerto that followed. I had thought Mendelssohn among that group of great composers who wrote only one violin concerto--Beethoven, Sibelius, Brahms, Dvorak, Tchaikovsky--but it seems I was wrong. Mendelssohn's beloved E minor concerto was not on the program but a piece in D minor--written when Mendelssohn was only 13 years old. I struggled to hear something suggesting the mature composer, despite what the program notes said on the subject, and the piece wasn't especially memorable, but it was interesting to hear, nevertheless. It was premiered only in 1952, by Yehudi Menuhin, according to an interesting Art Hound article I found online by Geneva Anderson about Barantshick and the violin he plays today (the 1742" David" Guarnerius del Gesú, formerly owned by Jascha Heifetz).

After intermission, the group took up Britten's Simple Symphony, among my favorite pieces of music. Call me a philistine, but I love the sound of strings played pizzicato, and this piece features an entire movement without bowing. It was fun to watch the group plucking and strumming. Beautifully played throughout.

The concert would have been worth it for the Britten alone, but a more or less perfect performance of Melodia-Libertango followed, with soloist Seth Asarnow on the bandoneon, a kind of concertina. The piece is credited to Astor Piazzola and Jeremy Cohen. The program notes explain that we heard a Medley of Piazzola's Melodia (composed in 1992, the last year of Piazzola's life) and his Libertango (1973) as arranged for string orchestra by violinist Cohen, the two pieces linked in this form by a violin cadenza composed by Cohen. Alexander Barantschik, concertmaster of the San Francisco Symphony, played the solo violin parts in this piece (and throughout the concert). A pianist and drummer joined the strings for the tangos. Asarnow's playing was exhilarating, but I enjoyed seeing his beautiful instrument as much as I enjoyed hearing the music. It appeared to be made of ebony with mother-of-pearl inlay. A second instrument was at his feet, although he never used it. A back-up? What is the bandoneon equivalent of breaking a string during performance, I wonder?

Photo of Alexander Barantschik courtesy of the San Francisco Symphony. Photo of Seth Asarnow from the Symphony Parnassus website. I'd be delighted to credit the photographer in each case, but no information is given. 

Wines I'm Making: 2012 Cabernet Final Racking (January 26, 2014)

Today I finally got around to racking the 2012 Cabernet that's been resting for more than a year now. I've racked it off the remaining lees in preparation for bottling the wine, which I'll do in the next couple of days. I sulfited the wine lightly, to about 50ppm. Judging from the taste I got siphoning the wine, it has turned out nicely. I look forward to opening the first bottle after it's been bottled, labeled, and given a chance to settle down again, probably sometime in late February--sooner, if possible. Getting a label designed will be the determining factor.

Art I'm Making: New Collages (January 26, 2014)

I've finished three new collages in the past week. All three are made from pieces of painted paper (paper painted directly with acrylic paint) or of paper cut from small mono-printed elements. Occasionally I incorporate pieces of handmade paper, but nearly all of what I use is made by painting or printing on plain paper. In one of these (top photo) I've also used a slightly three-dimensional element, although it's hard to see in the photo here. These are collages number 23, 24, and 25.

The collages are small--the smallest (bottom photo) measuring only about 3 x 4 inches, the larger two measuring about 5 x7 inches each.

Birds I'm Watching: Scaup at Lake Ralphine

On a recent visit to Lake Ralphine, the small lake at Howarth Park in Santa Rosa, I was pleased to see a good number of wintering ducks, including Buffleheads, Common Mergansers, A Gadwall, and a Ruddy Duck, but there was also group of about 10 Scaup.

Scaup come in two flavors--Greater Scaup and Lesser Scaup. They are very similar and hard to tell apart. I think these were mostly Greater Scaup. I'm pretty sure that at least the female pictured above is a Greater. The male (lower photo) may be a Lesser.

For more about birds and birding in Sonoma County, see my Website: Sonoma County Bird Watching Spots.

Art I'm Looking At: David Hockney at the De Young--Bigger is Not Always Better

David Hockney is much talked about and praised in the press. With even a passing interest in art it would be hard not to know of him. I think I first became aware of Hockney in the early 1970s, when I was just a teenager, when his swimming pool paintings were gaining attention in the serious art magazines--magazines I would often see at the home of one of my high school girlfriends.

I liked the pool paintings. Later, I saw and found interesting his composite works made from multiple Polaroid photographs--a seemingly cubist approach to viewing reality, although my understanding is that he was aiming not to present multiple simultaneous views of a scene but rather to overcome the distortions of very wide angle lenses. After a long blank, I remember seeing a series of paintings of the artist's dogs that struck me as badly drawn, garishly colored, and embarrassingly self-indulgent--evoking the same feelings as those self-published novels about the exploits of a coddled pet, of interest only to the writer and the publishing company squeezing money from the obsessed owner. Subsequently, I'd not heard much about Hockney until learning the De Young Museum in San Francisco was doing a substantial show of some very recent work--a show entitled David Hockney: A Bigger Exhibition. The title is curious, but now that I've seen the show, it makes some sense (more on that subject below).

Having last thought about Hockney in the context of the dog paintings, it was with some skepticism that I visited the De Young this past weekend. Nevertheless, I determined to go with an open mind. I wanted to see what Mr. Hockney had been up to lately. I was hopeful the show would be of interest.

It was interesting and I'm glad I went, but I found it interesting mostly on an academic level. Say what you will about him, he is nothing if not prolific and you have to admire his energy and willingness to experiment and use new media. Still, I have to say the show left me cold, and I find it difficult to understand why Hockney continues to get the attention he does. Seeing David Hockney: A Bigger Exhibition left me disappointed. The contrast with my emotional state after seeing the recent Richard Diebenkorn show at the De Young couldn't have been greater. That show left me energized, inspired, joyful, and greedily wanting to see more. The Hockney show left me mostly puzzled.

In the charcoal portraits that open the show, I saw awkward foreshortening, figures constructed using a vocabulary of crude marks on the paper themselves not especially interesting as details, and clumsy smudging that looked impatiently done. The work had an air of self-indulgence again. The drawings seemed to declare themselves worthy of scrutiny solely by virtue of their being by David Hockney and because of their presentation in a place like the De Young Museum, rather than because of deeply felt commitment, because of passion behind their creation. The introductory blurb describes David Hockney as a superb draughtsman. If by "superb draughtsman" we mean someone to an extraordinary degree capable of translating a view of the world or ideas into images using a precise, economical, and confident line; having a deep understanding of foreshortening and perspective; and capable of convincing modeling through use of light and shadow, then much of Hockney's work suggests rather that he is a crude draughtsman. And why pretend otherwise? We no longer require great artists to be great draughtsman. Fine draughtsmanship is not the only wellspring of worthwhile art. Art can and often does happily emerge from a far less disciplined place. Hockney's strengths lie elsewhere, but he seems to have forgotten himself. The pool paintings of the 1970s were so successful because the subject matter was well-suited to a brash approach to color, bold composition, and minimal use of line--traits that virtually define Hockney's artistic instincts. Hockney has a distinctive set of artistic tools, but all tools have strengths and weaknesses. It's for good reason that we don't hammer nails with screwdrivers.

The many landscapes in the show struck me similarly--as having the look of work done by an earnest, untutored amateur. There is a very large room in the show devoted entirely (and tiresomely) to charcoal landscapes depicting a road through Woldgate Woods, in Yorkshire, at different times of the year, excerpts from a chronicling of the seasonal transformation of the place. Recording seasonal effects is an interesting enough idea, but is it sufficient if the drawings themselves are not especially compelling? Hockney captures in these drawings something of the light and mood of the place, but I was struck by the ugliness of the marks he has made on his paper. At close range, the drawings decompose into fields of dark squiggles, hash marks, and areas of smudging. The drawings quickly become incoherent. They are much more effective if you turn 180 degrees to view the examples hanging on the opposite wall, from a distance of about 30 feet. It's not uncommon for a drawing or a painting to look markedly different when seen from different distances, but a truly fine drawing or painting is very often as interesting viewed from a few inches away as it is from many feet away. The image may disintegrate and become increasingly abstract as we move closer and we're forced to focus on details, but the details themselves are virtually always as compelling in their own way as is the whole, and this, I feel, is where Hockney's work is so disappointing. The individual marks on the surfaces seem to have no life. Thinking just of the Western artistic tradition, the feathered wingtip of an angel by Fra Angelico, a single flower at the foot of one of Botticelli's diaphanously draped women, one square inch of a Van Gogh pen and ink drawing, a single bright highlight in the dress of one of Sargeant's sitters, a feverish brushstroke by a De Kooning or a Karel Appel--any of these can hold our attention for a remarkably long time. At a normal viewing distance, I found the charcoal drawings of Woldgate Woods soulless.

Bigger is not always better.  David Hockney, A Bigger Exhibition is somewhat absurd in its fetishizing of scale and number. A section of the show highlights works Hockney has made by mounting four, six, or as many as 20 or more panels in arrays to create bigger pictures, some paintings, some digital images printed out on large inkjet printers and mounted. I found it hard to see anything much gained by this approach except scale. The titles carefully record the number of panels in each piece as if the number itself is an accomplishment. What is the point here? In other instances, one-sheet drawings created on an iPhone or an iPad have been blown up to a very large scale, notably a number of landscapes done at Yosemite National Park, and here the large scale and the use of the electronic device serve mostly to accentuate the lack of inherent interest in Hockney's "brushstrokes" again. Some of these images are so big that you can't step far enough away to allow distance to fudge things. One wall of the show is covered with video screens presenting slide shows of some of the artist's many other iPhone and iPad drawings. Being more in their native habitat--on computer monitors--these have more punch, more luminescence, and they seemed more successful for it. I'm not a luddite. I use the iPhone in my own artistic work. I'm all for experimentation and exploring new avenues of expression. Still, with art--unless it's conceptual art--it's the destination that counts, not so much how you get there. To assume that the work is inherently worthwhile because it was made using new technology is just another type of fetishism.

Somewhat ironically, a set of six large portraits made using a tablet, stylus, and Adobe Photoshop  in 2008 and 2009 were the most interesting pieces in the show, in my view. Each is a matter-of-fact observation of the sitter in a mostly empty space against a plain, brightly colored background. They owe much to Van Gogh.  The backgrounds are often split in two, a favorite Van Gogh device. In looking at A Bigger Matelot Kevin Druez 2 (2009), for example, I was immediately reminded of the Van Gogh portraits of Dr. Gachet or the postman Joseph Roulin. I'm not sure why these pictures seem so much more interesting than many of the others, but a major factor seems to be that they have been rendered in more detail and with more care than many of the landscapes and other portraits in the show. Here the individual strokes on the paper, although created digitally and printed, are of some interest. The compositions, though simple, seem more considered. The use of color seems more effective.

Other work draws heavily on Picasso--in particular, The Massacre and the Problems of Depiction (2003), essentially a re-working of Picasso's Massacre in Korea (1951), which takes as its subject a massacre of Korean civilians by US forces at No Gun Ri, in July, 1950, although many people in the galleries seemed to think it was derived from Picasso's Guernica (1937). Hockney has appended to the image a second, smaller image below, a crudely rendered photographer behind a tripod with his head under a darkcloth. What are we to make of this? Another group of works in the show was inspired by Claude Lorrain's Sermon on the Mount (c. 1656), culminating in a wall-sized rendering of that painting on multiple panels, which seemed most impressive as further evidence of Hockney's apparent obsession with size for its own sake. Hockney's version is called A Bigger Message (2010).

Two spaces in the show are devoted to Hockney's recent video explorations, which he calls "cubist movies." These I rather liked. Here the use of an array of screens makes sense. Hockney presents simultaneous views of a scene but from slightly different viewpoints. In these cubist movies (as well as the multiple Polaroid pictures of the past) the question of draughtsmanship is no longer an issue. The individual images that combine to create the whole are each created by a camera, whether still or moving. It becomes possible to focus on the concept behind the work without the distraction of questions about the quality of the rendering.

The last sections of the show suddenly veer back to portraits--some paintings, some drawings--and then to Hockney's interest in optical aids to drawing. The portraits generally are in much the same vein as the earlier portraits, but a series entitled 12 Portraits After Ingres in a Uniform Style (2000) is different and perplexing. According to the text in the galleries, Hockney was inspired to create these after seeing a show of the work of Ingres that led to an epiphany: Ingres must have used some kind of optical device to achieve the high quality of the work he's known for. However, it's not clear how these particular Hockney watercolors (in pairs, of guards at the National Gallery in London, all in uniform--an upper panel showing a closely cropped face set above a panel showing a hand in close-up) demonstrate anything much about Ingres. The lack of guidance here was especially frustrating.

These are followed by a wall of about 40 small portraits made using the camera lucida. Across from the camera lucida drawings and the Ingres series is a re-creation of Hockney's "The Great Wall," a large arrangement of reproductions of European art from around the 13th century to the 20th century, ordered chronologically on the horizontal axis and from north to south geographically on the vertical axis, originally assembled in Hockney's studio. The Great Wall, the story goes, was a response to Hockney's Ingres epiphany, the result of an early 1999 visit to the National Gallery in London. He became convinced suddenly by the increasing use of precise realism from around 1430 that artists at that time began to rely on devices such as the camera obscura, the camera lucida, and curved mirrors to achieve a high degree of realism. Hockney used the wall as a tool to investigate the trend and also to illustrate it. He presented his thesis in a 2001 book entitled Secret Knowledge: Rediscovering the Techniques of the Old Masters, co-authored by a physicist, Charles M. Falco. The book was controversial and generally got skeptical reviews. While artists certainly did use a variety of optical tools (Philip Steadman's Vermeer's Camera: Uncovering the Truth Behind the Masterpieces (Oxford University Press, 2002) is especially interesting in that regard), that was not news in 2001, and Hockney seems to have let enthusiasm far outrun the evidence.


Looking at the camera lucida drawings is instructive, however. Hockney's draughtsmanship greatly improves here. Still, he is no Ingres, even with the aid of the camera lucida. Essentially, the camera lucida is a prism mounted on a stand that allows the user to look simultaneously at a sheet of paper and a reflected image of a scene on that paper, making it possible to trace the exact contours of the projected image onto the paper. The camera lucida is a finicky device, however, that takes quite a lot of practice to use effectively. The artist's hand always obscures part of the projected image. Contrast is often low, making contours difficult to see. If the camera lucida could suddenly make a master of anyone that used it, most of us would have used it by now. Most of us would still be using it. I suspect that Hockney's draughtsmanship improves in the camera lucida drawings more because it forces concentration than because of any true advantage the device gives. A tool is a tool. An artist is an artist. Hockney's thesis is ultimately unconvincing. It's much easier and more persuasive to think that even if Ingres and others did sometimes use drawing aids, they were masters because of their mastery, not because of miraculous and secret devices.

In Summary, I wonder if it's really necessary to take Hockney's recent work as seriously as some seem to be doing. While the show was worth seeing, I'm glad I saw it free, as the guest of a member. Had I paid the $25 entry fee, I suspect I would have felt cheated. The show closed on January 20, 2014.

[Update--December 2, 2014. I recently found this review of Hockney's book Secret Knowledge on line. Well worth a read.]

Books I'm Reading: Mapping Mars

Oliver Morton's Mapping Mars (Picador, 2003), like so many books about science, is already out of date after only ten years. The rover Curiosity hadn't yet made its spectacular landing on Mars when Morton wrote his book. None of Curiosity's photos of the planet's surface had yet been created. The book is worth reading, nevertheless. Even if the author was unable to draw on the most recent waves of data from Mars, the book splendidly surveys how our conception of Mars has changed as new information about the place--perennially fascinating because it's both relatively Earth-like and almost entirely alien--has become available. The book is as much a survey of the culture of Martian science as it is a book about the planet itself: Morton writes fluently and engagingly both about Mars and about the people that have thought about the planet--astronomers and geologists mostly, but also artists and science fiction writers that have helped shaped the popular image of Mars. Recommended.

Found Art: Black Cloth (January 13, 2014)

This black cloth was hanging in front of the glass pane in a door somewhere. I liked the pattern created by the uneven application of whatever was used to color it black. Unintended art, serendipitous art.

For more unintended art, see my blog Serendipitous Art.

Plants I'm Growing: First Blooms--Pink flowering plum, dwarf cyclamen

The pink flowering plum in the front of the house and the dwarf cyclamen, Cyclamen coum, behind the house are reliably among the first plants in the garden to bloom each year--although beaten this year by our white flowering plum, now in full bloom, smelling heavenly. The dwarf cyclamen began blooming on January 13, 2014. It bloomed on December 23, 2012 (which I counted as 2013) and also on December 23, 2011 (counted as 2012). It bloom ed on January 3 in 2010 and January 8 in 2009, so this year was a bit later than usual. The plum began blooming on January 14. It bloomed on January 20 in 2013, January 22 in 2012, and January 19 in 2011--so, somewhat early this year.

Rain: A Weekend Dribble

We had our first rain in more than a month on Saturday (January 11). Anything is welcome, but it was a dribble--hardly enough to make a difference. At my house, we got 0.05 inches. That brings the 2013-2014 season total to a meager 2.85 inches. Normal for this date is about 17.5 inches. We are badly in need of rain. In 13 years of living in Santa Rosa, this is the driest it's ever been. We are in for a droughty summer.

Wines I'm Making: Malolactic Fermentation 2013

I tested samples of our 2013 Cabernet wine now undergoing malolactic fermentation, on January 5. I wanted to see how far along the fermentation is, as it's been quite a long time now since inoculation with malolactic starter on November 3. The results of my paper chromatography test are shown above. It looks like it's well under way, but not completely finished by any means. A completed malolactic fermentation will show lactic acid (in the position of the uppermost yellow spot) and no malic acid (in the position of the middle spot). This shows there is still malic acid present. The problem with waiting longer is that the wine is unsulfited and exposed (if minimally) to oxygen. The sooner it can be sulfited lightly and put away to rest the better. I've decided to wait a little longer, but will have to go ahead with the sulfite addition before too long.

Art I'm Making: Untitled Collage No. 21 (Santa Rosa)

First art of the new year. I finished this little collage on January 3rd. I looks a little darker and muddier in the photograph here than it does in real life, but it's a reasonable facsimile. Acrylic paint on paper with acrylic mono-printed elements.

Wines I'm Drinking: 2012 Chateau Marceau Launay

Over the years I've noticed that medals, awards, and other accolades on wine bottles often don't mean very much. The medals given out at the Paris agricultural show each year usually do, however. I came across a little Bordeaux wine today, the 2012 Chateau Marceau Launay that won a Gold Medal at the 2013 Paris show, so I thought I'd give it a try, as it was being offered at a very attractive price (only $6.99 at my local Grocery Outlet). Brief tasting notes follow.

Although not thin-looking, the wine was not the dense, opaque red that some wines are. Despite its youth, it looked moderately mature, being a fairly medium red hinting more at garnet than at the purple of a very new wine. Scents of vanilla and oak were predominant on the nose, with hints of cardamom and orange peel. Not especially forthcoming at first, but pleasant enough. Light-bodied and quite tannic initially. Rather closed on the palate, but with a little plumminess and some hints of cocoa on a moderately long finish. Although a bit disappointing at the moment, this would seem to have some promise. I suspect it will need time to show at its best, and it opened up noticeably just with some time in the glass. [A second bottle I opened a week later and decanted was noticeably more approachable and quite tasty]. I've tucked away five bottles for future contemplation. I'll probably open the next one in two or three years [That was optimistic--although now I'll probably wait that long]. At this price, well worth a small, speculative investment. While I don't think this will appeal to West Coast palates accustomed to high alcohol content and up-front fruit, it's well worth considering if you enjoy European-style reds and you're the patient type. If you open a bottle while it's still young, decant it and give it a little time before drinking it. Perhaps at peak around 2020?

(I have no financial connection with any producer or retailer of wine.)

For more wine reviews, use the Wines I'm Drinking label.

Plants I'm Growing: First Blooms--Flowering Japanese Plum (December 30, 2013)

For several years now I've been keeping a record of the first blooms of the year of various plant species in the garden. Usually our dwarf cyclamen (Cyclamen coum) has the first blooms of the new year, in very late December (I count these December flowers as new blooms because they're the first blooms in the new cycle of flowering each year). This year (thinking of 2014) the honor goes to the white Japanese plum behind the house (Prunus mume), which starting blooming yesterday, December 30--quite early for this plant. It typically blooms in the second or third week of January. In 2012, it bloomed on January 14. In 2011, it bloomed earlier than usual, on January 4. It bloomed on January 19 in 2010 and on January 21 in 2009. I don't seem to have a record for 2013.

Art I'm Making: Untitled Collage No. 20 (Santa Rosa) (December 25, 2013)

I finished another collage on Christmas morning. It has nothing to do with Christmas. It's just another abstraction using painted papers and paper that I've printed on using the monotype technique (paint spread on a glass surface, manipulated, and then printed onto a sheet of paper). This one also incorporates scraps of a handwoven, dyed sheet of paper that I found at our local art supply store, Village Art Supply, in Montgomery Village. I'm hoping that its color won't fade, as the plum color went very well with colors I already had at hand.

Wines I'm Making: Hard Cider Bottled (December 23, 2013)

Yesterday, December 23, I bottled the hard cider made from this year's apples. The ten gallons ended up as 48 22-ounce bottles and 19 12-ounce bottles. I dosed the fermented cider with about 26g of corn sugar for each gallon of cider in order to start the in-bottle secondary fermentation that will give it some sparkle. The recipes call for up to 33g of sugar per gallon, but I didn't have enough sugar, and the first time I made hard cider (in February this year) I used 26g per gallon and the bubbles were fine, so I didn't bother to get more sugar. Knowing that a fermentation is going on in a sealed bottle always makes me a little nervous (probably needlessly), so I've decided to leave the bottles in the upstairs bathtub while the fermentation is underway. If there are any accidents, spilled cider won't destroy the carpet or hardwood floors that way. I don't really expect problems, though.

I capped the portion fermented using White Labs English cider yeast with green caps. The portion fermented with the Mangrove Jack yeast I capped with gold caps. After about two weeks, the cider should be lightly carbonated and ready to drink, but longer aging should allow it to develop a little. We'll see how long this batch lasts. The 3-gallon batch I made earlier in the year was so good it disappeared in about three weeks.