Art I'm Making: Untitled Collage No. 129 (Santa Rosa)

New collage, February 15, 2016—Untitled Collage No. 129 (Santa Rosa), using monoprinted papers. Image size: 14.3 x 13.2cm. Matted to 20 x 16 inches. Signed and dated on the reverse. Signed on the mat.

Click on the image for a larger view. For more, visit my collage website at: http://ctalcroft.wix.com/collage-site/

Places I'm Visiting: The Art-o-Mat® at San Francisco's Exploratorium

The Exploratorium moved from its old location at the Palace of Fine Arts to Pier 15 on the Embarcadero a couple years back. I hadn't visited the new site before. The display area has been greatly expanded, it seems. Short on time, I decided to go in another time, when it wouldn't be necessary to rush. Mainly, I had wanted to see the Art-o-Mat® there, anyway.

The art vending machine at The Exploratorium turned out to be in the Exploratorium shop, which is accessible without paying the entry fee. I bought a piece of art (as well as a T-shirt showing the periodic table of elements and a little electric robot kit that draws random patterns with pens).

An Art-o-Mat® is a vintage cigarette machine converted to dispensing art rather than cigarettes. This is the third one I've visited of 11 in California. For more about the Art-o-Mat®, see this post.

Serendipitous Art: Reflected Window Light (February 18, 2016)

Light from the silvered windows of a building in San José made this pattern of light and dark on an adjacent building. Unintended art.

For more unintended art, see my blog Serendipitous Art.

Art I'm Making: Untitled Collage No. 128 (Santa Rosa)

I finished a new collage on February 14—Untitled Collage No. 128 (Santa Rosa), this one using both monoprinted and painted papers. Image size: 17.6 x 12.1cm. Matted to 20 x 16 inches. Signed and dated on the reverse. Signed on the mat.

[Update: This image was subsequently sold to Imagery Estate Winery and is in the winery's permanent collection. It appeared in 2017 on the label of their 2016 Muscat de Canelli.]

Click on the image for a larger view. For more, visit my collage website at: http://ctalcroft.wix.com/collage-site/

Rain: Rain Again (February 17-18, 2016)

We had the first new rain today, February 17, since February 2. By afternoon 0.45 inches had accumulated and it was still raining early into the morning of the 18th. The total was 17.65 inches on February 2, which means we are now over 18 inches, but rain is in the forecast for the next day or two.

[Update: By the morning of February 18 (that is, by the time I awoke on the 18th), there was 0.90 inches of new rain in the rain gauge. That brings our 2015-2016 total to 18.55 inches at my location in Santa Rosa, although other stations are reporting somewhat less. The historical average for February 18 in Santa Rosa is 24.53 inches, so, the two-week dry spell that just ended set us back considerably. We are six inches behind normal again. What happened to El Niño?]

[Update: More rain on the night of the 18th and into the 19th added 0.35 inches. So, as of 5:00PM on the 19th, our 2015-2016 total stood at 18.90 inches (at my location; some local media have reported a little over 20 inches.]

Plants I'm Growing: First Blooms—Pink Flowering Plum, Golden Currant, "Dapple Dandy" Pluot

I belatedly report on some of the plants that have recently started blooming in the garden. February 5 brought the first blooms this year on the pink flowering plum behind the house (Prunus blireana) on the golden currant bush (Ribes aureum). The pluot "Dapple Dandy" (top) began blooming on February 11 this year.

"Dapple Dandy" bloomed on February 5, 15, 4, 2, 23, and 3 in 2009 to 2014, so a first bloom date of February 11 is neither early nor late.

The plum has bloomed on February 17, 11, 2, and 15 in past years, so February 5 is on the early side but within the normal range.

The golden currant has bloomed as early as February 10 (in 2011) and as late as March 5 (2013), so a first bloom date of February 5 is somewhat earlier than usual.

Places I'm Visiting/Art I'm Looking At: Aline Smithson at The Rayko Photo Center

I visited the Rayko Photo Center in San Francisco yesterday for the first time, a place I've known about for a couple of years but never quite made it to. I wanted to see the current show, but also wanted to see the Art-o-Mat® at Rayko, one of several in the Bay Area, and one of 11 in California. I've long had a vague idea it would be fun to visit them all. This is the second I've seen in person. (An Art-o-Mat® is a vintage cigarette machine converted to dispensing art rather than cigarettes. For more about the Art-o-Mat®, see this post.)

The Photo Center has camera displays (some for show, some for sale), formal gallery space, some informal space that was showing student work, a large selection of the work of local photographers for sale, and rental studio space and darkrooms (both digital and analog), as well as work areas for mounting and matting prints. The center has a regular schedule of classes. Virtually everything to do with photography is here. There is even a vintage photo booth in the space.

Among the photographs for sale, I particularly liked work by Ryuten Paul Rosenblum, Cherie Mayman, and Nicolo Sertorio. I was impressed by Ella Dean among the student photographers. Cherie Mayman's piece was a blurry, dreamy platinum print of what looked like bottles suspended in the air.

The main show was Self and Others, work by Aline Smithson from a number of different series. A few of the images are black and white. Most are large color prints. The various series—portraiture broadly defined for the most part—seemed united by a fondness for large, mostly unarticulated areas of bold color and an isolated subject, often looking right at the camera or just off camera, although a series entitled Arrangement in Green and Black: Portrait of the Photographer's Mother is a set of 21 plays on Whistler's famous portrait of his mother, all imitating that work by using the photographer's mother seated sideways to the picture plane against a plain background (pale green and black in this case) with a painting hanging on the wall behind. The subject is flamboyantly dressed, the attire very different from the drab colors Whistler's mother wears. The paintings on the wall are likewise a sharp departure from the grey and palest beige of the print on the wall in Whistler's painting, yet each of Smithson's hand-colered images is anchored by the strength of Whistler's simple composition.

Selections from the series Hollywood at Home included one of my favorite pieces in the show Red Nails and Daisies (left). In this series, Smithson, who grew up in Hollwood, has posed models in allusion to the staged photos of Hollywood stars in their homes that were popular in the 1940s and 1950s. In her blurb about the series, Smithson says "In a reality-TV society where celebrity and stardom is possible without talent or reason, the idea that anyone can become a star has indeed become a reality." The song "Hooray for Hollywood" comes to mind. Although my reproduction here fails to capture the subtlety of the lavender of the plastic flowers in the bathing cap, it should give some sense of how well Smithson has captured the color of the photography of the period.

Most of the photos in the show, however, are from a series called Revisiting Beauty, portraits of young women between the age of 14 and 17 "on the cusp of womanhood and not  fully aware of their own loveliness," as Smithson puts it (a detail of one image is shown at left). Each of the young women is photographed against a strongly colored backdrop enhanced with landscape images from California or China, although these landscape elements are so subtly integrated that it's easy to miss them altogether. There are allusions here to the entire history of formal portraiture, particularly painted portraiture. Beside the beauty of the women themselves, the most striking element in Revisiting Beauty is the use of color. There is an alluring simplicity and directness of color that goes very well with the simple dignity of the sitters and a not-quite-acknowledged hint of their sexual appeal. According to the wall tags, Smithson sees her portraiture as collaborative and her portrait series taken together as a kind of autobiography. Well worth a look. Self and Others runs through February 29, 2016.

The next show at Rayko Photo Center will be The Ninth Annual Plastic Camera Show, opening March 9 and running through April 29. Opening reception on the first day of the show, March 9, 2016.

Art I'm Making: Untitled Collage No. 127 (Santa Rosa)

My most recent collage. A small piece.

Untitled Collage No. 127 (Santa Rosa). January 30, 2016. Acrylic on paper, acrylic monoprint, collage. Image size: 10.5 x 13.8cm. Matted to 11 x 14 inches. Signed and dated on reverse. Signed on the mat.

Click on the image for a larger view. For more, visit my collage website at: http://ctalcroft.wix.com/collage-site/

Movies I'm Watching: Wings (1966)

The Criterion Collection streaming on Hulu Plus is a treasure. I don't watch the films available there as often as I should, but last night I randomly selected a Russian film called Wings (1966) that was a real treat. Beautifully filmed and acted. Storytelling at its best. Well worth the 84 minutes it runs. Made by Larisa Shepitko. Starring (if that's the right word—there is no Hollywood glitz here)—character actress Maya Bulgakova as a once-heroic Soviet fighter pilot now living a life of quiet desperation as a school principal.

Somehow, I found myself watching Hobson's Choice (1954) afterward—a beautifully restored print and another fine film. I noticed something funny in Hobson's Choice: a nuclear power plant cooling tower is visible in the background of one of the scenes. I've seen the film maybe five times and never noticed it before. The story is set in the age of the bustle—when the bustle was brand new in the world of feminine fashions—so, perhaps around 1870, long before nuclear reactors....

Photo from The Criterion Collection website.

Art I'm Making: Untitled Collage No. 126 (Santa Rosa)

Yet another new collage from the past week.... I'm trying to keep to the disciplined pace I set for myself two years ago--on average, one finished piece a week.

Untitled Collage No. 126 (Santa Rosa). January 23, 2016. Acrylic on paper, acrylic monoprint, found paper (sandpaper), collage. Image size: 23.6 x 11.4cm. Matted to 20 x 16 inches. Signed and dated on reverse. Signed on the mat.

Click on the image for a larger view. For more, visit my collage website at: http://ctalcroft.wix.com/collage-site/

Plants I'm Growing: First Blooms—Yellow Daffodils (January 31, 2016)

Our yellow daffodils began blooming on January 31 this year. That's a tiny bit on the early side. It's the first time since I began keeping track that they've opened in January—although I'm missing data for a couple of years. They bloomed on February 3 in 2015, February 4 in 2013, February 2, in 2011, and February 5 in 2009.

Art I'm Making: Untitled Collage No. 125 (Santa Rosa)

Untitled Collage No. 125 (Santa Rosa). January 22, 2016. Acrylic on paper, acrylic monoprint, collage. Image size: 10.7 x 10.3cm. Matted to 11 x 14 inches. Signed and dated on reverse. Signed on the mat.

Click on the image for a larger view. For more, visit my collage website at: http://ctalcroft.wix.com/collage-site/

Art I'm Looking At: Deborah Salomon and Lisa Beerntsen on The Art Wall at Shige Sushi

I'm pleased to announce the upcoming show on The Art Wall at Shige Sushi. We'll be showing paintings (oil and watercolors) by Lisa Beerntsen and collages by Deborah Salomon. The new show is entitled Facets: Collage, watercolors, and oil paintings by Lisa Beerntsen and Deborah Salomon. Lisa Beerntsen’s delicately colored paintings are suggestive of mineral formations and complex organic molecules. Deborah Salomon’s subtle collages of found material are overlaid with multi-faceted forms that reflect a life-long interest in crystal structures. Two Sonoma County artists take a faceted approach to space. On the Art Wall at Shige Sushi, 8235 Old Redwood Highway, Downtown Cotati, 94931. February 2 through April 3, 2016. Opening reception Monday, February 8, 2016, 5:30Pm to 7:30PM. Light refreshments served. Hope to see you there.

For more information about current and upcoming shows on The Art Wall, visit The Art Wall website at http://ctalcroft.wix.com/artwallatshige/

Wines I'm Making: 2014 Cabernet Bottled

I finally got around to bottling our 2014 Cabernet Sauvignon/Cabernet Franc (on January 24). We made only 25 bottles—but that's more than the vines yielded in 2015 (I expect to get only 15 bottles from the grapes harvested this past year). The wine is sound, but a little lacking in ripeness. The trees in the neighbor's yard have gotten so tall that the vines get too much shade now. I'm looking into ways to counteract that effect. I used the same label design as for the 2004, which was our first vintage.

Rain: More Rain (January 29, 2016)

A day of drizzle has so far added another 0.45 inches of rain to our annual total—which I will update as soon as the skies clear again. The total before this rain was 17.05 inches. The historical average for this date is 20.10 inches, so we'll still be below average even with this new rain, unless it pours overnight.

[It didn't pour with rain overnight, but I found 0.50 inches in the rain gauge on the morning of the 30th. So, our total is now 17.60 inches at my location—still about three inches below normal.]

[We got 0.05 inches on February 2, and more rain is expected overnight. The total is now at 17.65 inches at my location.]

Miscellaneous: Too Many Kinds of Beer?

Buying beer used to be so much easier. This is a view of about half of the beer selection at my local supermarket.

Art I'm Looking At: "Looking East" at the Asian Art Museum, San Francisco

By now, most anyone with more than a passing interest in art history understands there was a period of intense interest in Japan and things Japanese in the second half of the 19th century that had a profound impact on Western art and design. Because of that, I suspect "Looking East: How Japan Inspired Monet, Van Gogh, and Other Western Artists" at San Francisco's Asian Art Museum will seem like a rehashing of the obvious to more than a few visitors. But don't let that keep you from going. There is much of interest on display, all from the collection of The Museum of Fine Arts, in Boston—well known for the quality of its Asian collections in particular.

The Boston museum must be bursting at the seams. I ran into a couple at the show from Boston who said its best pieces seem to be perpetually on loan somewhere (they came here to see work they rarely get to see at home), and, although I've never visited the Boston museum, I have seen many of its masterpieces on tour in Tokyo, including Van Gogh's 1888 portrait of the postman Joseph Roulin, which is now in the San Francisco show.

All the familiar points are made. Wall texts and a short video presentation touch upon the freshness of much of Japanese art and design to Western eyes when things Japanese began to arrive in quantity in Europe and the United States in the late 1850s. In particular, Western artists and designers were inspired by Japanese attention to scenes of everyday life; by bold compositions that often relied on large expanses of black, a lack of perspective and shading as illusionary techniques resulting in a flattening of the picture plane, use of strong patterning, sharp diagonals, and a fondness for boldly truncated scenes (and asymmetrical balance in general); by attention to detail in the applied arts; and by highly advanced full-color woodblock printing techniques—perhaps the most sophisticated in the world at the time. These and other ideas are illustrated by more than 170 Western and Japanese pieces, including examples of the decorative arts, paintings, prints, drawings, and textiles. Shown here is Kikukawa Eizan's Otome (c. 1818–23) and a painting by Cassatt (Caresse Maternelle, c. 1902), inspired by Japanese depictions of mothers with their children.    

Even if the ideas aren't new, the show is worth seeing for the individual works of art on display, and a worthwhile attempt has been made to show pieces side-by-side that illustrate the ideas discussed. In addition to the Van Gogh portrait, highlights include works by Monet, Cassatt, Toulouse Lautrec, Edvard Munch, and others, among Western artists; prints by Hiroshige, Hokusai, Eizan, Kunisada, and others, among Japanese print designers—including some of the finest individual impressions I've ever seen; some excellent decorative art; and, at the end of the show, a small group of photographs showing Japanese influence, including work by Karl Struss and Alvin Langdon Coburn. The latter's Tower Bridge (1909) is shown below.      

"Looking East: How Japan Inspired Monet, Van Gogh, and Other Western Artists" closes February 7, 2016. At the Asian Art Museum, 200 Larkin St, San Francisco, CA 94102, (415)-581-3500. Open Tues—Sun  10AM—5PM. Closed Mondays. Prices for the show vary. Members get free admission. Children (12 and under) and SFUSD students are free. Adults $20 on weekdays, $25 on weekends. Seniors (65 and over), youths (13-17), and college students with ID are $15 on weekdays, $20 on weekends. These prices seem a bit steep, although they include general admission. That said, you'd need an entire day to see both the Japan show and the permanent collections, so, essentially, you're paying the entire amount to see the special exhibition–unless you move through galleries far more quickly than I do.

Art I'm Making: New Collage (January 25, 2016)

A new collage piece—Untitled Collage No. 124 (Santa Rosa). Finished January 21, 2016. Acrylic on paper, acrylic monoprint, collage. Image size: 17.3 x 16.0cm. Matted to 16 x 20 inches. Signed and dated on the reverse. Signed on the mat.

Click on the image for a larger view. For more, use the Art I'm Making tab to the right, or visit my collage website at: http://ctalcroft.wix.com/collage-site/.

Birds I'm Watching: White-faced Ibises at Ellis Creek Water Recycling Facility

White-faced Ibises at Ellis Creek Water Recycling Facility (in Petaluma) have been a hot topic among Sonoma county birders the past couple of weeks. A group of nine of these birds (rare in our area) has been hanging out there since early January. Today I got some good photos. Also of interest were a large number of Green-winged Teals, among other ducks.

For more information about bird watching in Sonoma County, see my Website Sonoma County Bird Watching Spots.

Plants I'm Growing: In the Garden (January 2016)

I'm always happy to see flowers blooming mid-winter. Our camellia (Camellia sasanqua, a variety called "Chansonette"), which reliably starts blooming as winter comes on (sometimes as early as early October) is finished, but we have a white flowering plum, a dwarf cyclamen (Cyclamen coum), and Manzanitas blooming now. Especially pretty among the Manzanitas is Arctostaphylos pajaroensis, which I sought out for its pink blossoms and orange-tinged new foliage. The cyclamen started blooming on or about January 15 this year. The flowering plum is in full bloom.

 

Wines I'm Drinking: 2005 Pata Negra Valdepeñas Gran Reserva

The 2005 Pata Negra Valdepeñas Gran Reserva, although heavily discounted, was a pleasant surprise. Medium-deep garnet--pretty in the glass. Cherries, licorice, chocolate, and mint on the nose are echoed on the palate. At ten years old, this wine from Valdepeñas, in central Spain, is soft and supple--perhaps even a little lacking in tannic backbone, but a very pleasant, smooth, easy drink that's a bargain at only $5.99 at Grocery outlet. A decent everyday wine, even if lacking in the up-front fruit consumers used to fruit-forward California wines may expect.

Rain: Getting There.... (January 19-23, 2016)

Overnight more rain. I found 1.20 inches of new rain in the rain gauge today after the skies cleared. That brings our total for the 2015-2016 rain year to 14.85 inches. The historical average for this day in Santa Rosa is about 18.54 inches, so we are now less than four inches behind normal—a substantial improvement. But the target keeps moving. More rain is predicted over the weekend and next week, however. A couple more good storms and we might actually overtake the average. Normal annual rainfall in the Santa Rosa area is 36.28 inches.

[Update: By the morning of January 23, we had had another 2.2 inches of rain since last reporting. That brings the total to 17.05 inches at my location in Santa Rosa. We're still below the historical average, which is 19.25 inches for January 23, but this is the closest to normal rainfall we've been in a long time.]

Birds I'm Watching: Great Horned Owl (January 18, 2016)

A Great Horned Owl appeared in a tree across the street from my house this morning. I was alerted to its presence by a neighbor. The bird allowed me to take its portrait. It has a rather amiable look, but Great Horned Owls are among the most powerful predatory birds in North America. They happily eat skunks and have been known to go after fairly large pets. He was mobbed by about 100 crows off and on for several hours today. The  bird appears to be there still but all is quiet now. Yard bird number 68.

For more information about bird watching in Sonoma County, see my Website Sonoma County Bird Watching Spots.

Art I'm Making: Untitled Collage No. 123 (Santa Rosa)—January 14, 2016

My latest collage. Untitled Collage No. 123 (Santa Rosa), January 14, 2016. Acrylic on paper, acrylic monoprint, collage. 13 x 17.6cm. matted to 16 x 20 inches. Signed and dated on reverse. Signed on the mat. Click on the image for a larger view.

Click on the image for a larger view. For more, use the Art I'm Making tab to the right, or visit my collage website at: http://ctalcroft.wix.com/collage-site/.

Art I'm Looking At: Raphael's Portrait of a Lady with a Unicorn at the Legion of Honor

The Galleria Borghese in Rome, in what was once the Villa Borghese Pinciana, houses a large part of the collection of paintings, sculpture, and ancient artifacts amassed by Cardinal Scipione Borghese, a nephew to Pope Paul V (in power from 1605 to 1621). The Villa was built by Flaminio Ponzio, who worked mainly for the Pope, the building and its gardens based on ideas proposed by Cardinal Borghese. On the outskirts of Rome at the time, it was used by the Cardinal for entertaining. Among the many works housed at the Galleria Borghese today is an enigmatic 1506 portrait by Raphael known as Portrait of a Lady with a Unicorn, presently on display at The Legion of Honor, in San Francisco.

Finding it requires a short hike past many works of interest in the permanent collection (as well as a couple of ghastly paintings by El Greco) at the far end of a row of linked galleries. The Raphael has been given a small room of its own painted an ox-blood red that complements the sleeve color of the sitter in Raphael's portrait. Her name is unknown, but we are told the painting was probably commissioned to commemorate a wedding. That view is based on internal clues—mainly that x-ray examination has shown the unicorn was originally painted as a small dog, traditionally a symbol of marital fidelity, but the wall text points out that she wears a gold-clasped belt, symbolizing fertility and associated with marriage; that the necklace she wears was likely a betrothal gift or part of her dowry; and that the jewels it contains—pearls, rubies, and sapphires—were associated with such traits as virginity and purity (the pearls), prosperity and fertility (rubies), and fidelity (sapphires). There is also a suggestion that the unicorn may refer to her family's heraldry, although, if that is true, I wonder why the animal was not painted as a unicorn from the outset. An inspired afterthought, perhaps?

There are obvious echoes of Mona Lisa, as the wall text also points out. Most important of these is perhaps the sitter's slightly sideways, three-quarter-length pose with hands folded in her lap, but also the use of a parapet with columns (the columns barely visible in Mona Lisa) to separate the subject from a distant landscape behind her. Although there are precedents for both, the inclusion of an imagined landscape in the background is often considered an unusual feature of Mona Lisa, painted over a number of years from around 1503. Raphael has used this device, but he leaves the horizon low, at the shoulders of the sitter, while Leonardo uses horizontal landscape elements to draw attention to La Giaconda's eyes (a trick that, simplified, Van Gogh would later use to great effect in his self-portrait with a pipe and bandaged ear).

The hands have quite different effects in the two paintings. The hands of Leonardo's sitter are open and relaxed, Raphael's sitter captures her little unicorn's hooves and holds them tight. Her arms cradle the animal. The dark sleeves of her dress act like a pair of parentheses. The visual complexity of Mona Lisa is behind the main subject and mostly in the upper half of the painting. In the Raphael, the visual complexity is below and in front of the main subject. The face of the unicorn attracts almost as much attention as the face of the woman. If the beast were not so clearly in her possession, subordinated to her and under her control, this would be a dual portrait. Nevertheless, part of the painting's effectiveness is the back-and-forth between the two faces the unicorn's presence forces on the viewer. La Giaconda is much easier to look steadily in the eye than is Raphael's lady.

The small size of the cradled unicorn is rather startling at first, but, according to the wall text, the unicorn was often depicted in early bestiaries as a small animal—kid-like—rather than as the full-sized horse-with-horn we think of today. The unicorn was said to be wild and untamable but with a key weakness—a fondness for young virgins. A unicorn could be captured or killed if lured to sleep in the lap of a maiden, we are told, and a unicorn in the lap of a virgin was a common motif associated with the Virgin Mary and the Christ Child. So, the Raphael painting can be read as a Madonna and Child not only as a wedding portrait.

The unicorn story puts me in mind of other men and beasts with a fatal weakness—near-immortal Achilles and his heel, of course—but also the kappa, a vaguely humanoid creature of Japanese folklore with a beak and characteristics of a reptile or amphibian, including a turtle-like shell. Mischief makers that dwell near streams and ponds, kappa are said to play pranks on passersby, sometimes with fatal consequences. The seat of the animal's power is a water-filled depression on the top of its head—but, if the water drains away, the kappa loses its power. Kappa, the stories go, are very polite, however. So they can be rendered temporarily powerless by a formal bow in greeting—as the animal will always return the bow, letting the water spill from its head. Similarly, Raphael's unicorn is at least temporarily tamed, captured and held in the lap of the maiden, a victim of its special weakness.

A chronology on one wall reveals other facts. The painting was first recorded in the collection of the Galleria Borghese in 1638. Surprisingly, Raphael's lady was once partially painted over, the image having been converted to a portrayal of St. Catharine of Alexandria some time after 1682 with the addition of a cloak around her shoulders, a palm branch (a symbol of martyrdom), and a wheel (Catharine is said to have been tortured to death—broken on the wheel). Until 1927, when the underlying work was firmly attributed to Raphael by Italian art historian Roberto Longhi (working from an earlier suggestion floated by historian Giulio Cantalamessa that two artists had worked on the painting—one markedly more skilled than the other), authorship was unclear. The painting was attributed variously to Perugino, Ghirlandaio, Granacci, and others. Suspicions about the later additions were confirmed in 1933, when the painting was first x-rayed and tests subsequently showed the existence of landscape elements under the cloak. Restoration work commenced in early 1936 when the image was transferred to canvas from the original panel and removal of the overpainting began. Within about 30 years, better x-ray technology revealed the presence of the dog under the unicorn.  

While I would like to have seen better images of the painting as St. Catherine, before restoration, (do they exist?)* and I would have enjoyed more details of the restoration process (described as having been done with a scalpel), the gallery offers a concise and informative presentation of an important painting. Yes, it's worth making a trip to see this single image.

Portrait of a Lady with a Unicorn will be showing at the Legion of Honor through April 10, 2016. San Francisco is its second of only two stops in the United States following a stay from October 3, 2015 to January 3, 2016 in Cincinnati at the Cincinnati Art Museum. The painting is visiting the United States for the first time. Viewers in Cincinnati got to see the painting for free. At the Legion of Honor, admission ranges from $6 for students to $10 for adults ($7 for seniors). Closed Mondays. The exhibition is organized by the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco and the Cincinnati Art Museum in collaboration with the Foundation for Italian Art and Culture and the Galleria Borghese. The Legion of Honor presentation is made possible by lead sponsorship from the Frances K. and Charles D. Field Foundation, in memory of Mr. and Mrs. Charles D. Field, with additional major funding from The Christian Humann Foundation.

* I have attempted to find such an image on line, with no success. However, Raphael actually did paint St. Catherine of Alexandria (below), around 1507, thus not long after he painted Lady with Unicorn. He shows her with her symbol, the wheel. The painting is in the National Gallery, London. The photographs of Mona Lisa and Raphael's St. Catharine are from Wikipedia.

[Update: This Hyperallergic article reproduces a black and white image of the painting from 1900, before its restoration.]

Rain: More rain (January 12-18, 2016)

We keep getting new rain--which is great--but the historical average keeps rising, because it's normal to get rain at this time of year. The average for this date in Santa Rosa is a little over 17 inches. Last night we got 0.90 inches of new rain, bringing our total for the 2015-2016 rain year to 11.00 inches--six full inches below normal. We should catch up, if the rains continue this year. Time will tell.

[Update: Overnight on the 14th-15th we got an additional 0.60 inches, bringing the total at my Santa Rosa location now to 11.60 inches.]

[Update: More rain. It rained most of the day on the 17th and overnight into the early morning of the 18th, adding 2.05 inches of new rain. That brings our total to 13.65 inches so far. The historical average for January 18 is 18.35 inches. More rain is predicted for this week.]

Art I'm Making: Seascape (January 9, 2016)

Out at Duncan's Landing, Bodega Bay, yesterday (January 9, 2016) I made a few landscape photos. I especially liked this one. I think I may attempt a series of these.

Rain: New Rain (January 3-5, 2015)

We've had a little more rain overnight on January 3-4, adding 0.30 inches to our annual total, which now stands at 7.25 inches. I'd been hoping for more than that, but more storms appear to be on the way.

[Update: Heavy rain on the morning of January 5 has so far added another inch of rain and it's still raining. At 8.25 inches as of 11:00AM, we are still well below normal, however, as average rainfall by this date historically has been just under 15 inches.]

[Update: Another 0.95 inches overnight on January 5-6 leaves us now at 9.2 inches for the year. Better, but still well below normal.]

[Update: A further 0.9 inches on January 6 puts the total now at 10.1 inches for the 2015-2016 rain year.]

Art I'm Making: New Collage

My latest piece of collage work. Untitled Collage No. 122 (Santa Rosa), December 19, 2015. Acrylic monoprint, found paper (antique silver leaf), collage. Image size 11 x 13.2cm. Signed and dated on the reverse. Signed on the mat. Click on the image for a larger view.

For more, use the Art I'm Making tab to the right, or visit my collage website at: http://ctalcroft.wix.com/collage-site/

Miscellaneous: Nine-dollar Bread

I was a bit startled recently by seeing a loaf of bread on sale at my local Whole Foods for $9. I'm sure it's good bread, but $9? Ingredients are simply flour (albeit some of it organic), water, and salt. $9?