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.  

Art I'm making: More Collages (December 20, 2013)

I've completed three new collages in the past couple of days. I work with acrylic paints to make colored paper, often printing on the paper using paint spread on glass to create mono-print effects or using painted paper to print directly onto other sheets of paper. The effects continue to amuse me.

I'm quite pleased with these last three, although the deep plum sauce color in a couple of them doesn't photograph very well....

Wines I'm Making: 2013 Rosé Bottled (December 19, 2013)

Yesterday, I bottled our 2013 Sangiovese Rosé. The wine is a beautiful, deep, pink-amber this year--deeper in color than in past years. I don't know why. This year, the grapes soaked about 20 hours with the skins before pressing, which has been fairly typical. Depth of color should mostly be a function of the time the grapes spend on the skins--all else being equal--but the 2012 wine spent 22 hours on the skins and it was a paler color. Whatever the reason for the deep color this year, the wine is pretty. I'm very pleased with the results in general. I think this may be the best rosé we've made so far, edging out the excellent 2009.

We had some very cold weather while the wine was resting (down to as low as about 19 degrees F). Cold causes the formation of tartaric acid crystals in the bottom of the container (photo below), which is very convenient, as it creates a hard crust over the deposit of dead yeast and other precipitates that can be a pain when siphoning wine. With the rosé, siphoning is always a breeze as there is nothing floating freely to cloud the wine or suck up from the bottom; it's all encapsulated by the crust of crystals.

We had the first bottle last night with an asparagus and portobello mushroom risotto that I made. Excellent, if I do say so myself. Now it's time to design a label.

Tidbits: RIP--Peter O'Toole and Joan Fontaine (December 15, 2013)

I was very sorry to hear of the death of Peter O'Toole today. I'm sure I'm not the only person who will always think of him in his role as T. E. Lawrence in the film that made him an international star--although he did so much else.... It's been interesting to see how much attention the event has been getting. I read later in the day that actress Joan Fontaine died today as well. It's a shame she's not being remembered as widely. Her death appears to have been overshadowed by that of O'Toole.

Art I'm Making: New Collages (December 12, 2013)

My pace of work making collages has slowed, but I've done a couple more since last reporting. One is a very small piece (only about 3 x 4 inches) made from small scraps from all the other things I've made in the past few weeks. The other is a monochrome piece I made out of scraps of paper I had intended for a different collage--but no matter. Both are made from painted paper and monotyped paper elements. The originals look much better than the photos here. One thing I've learned is that photographing art is an art in itself.

[Update: I subsequently destroyed the second of these, so I have removed the image of it here. I decided it wasn't worth keeping.]

Wines I'm Making: Hard Cider--First Racking (December 6, 2013)

On Friday, December 6, I racked the hard cider I'm making off the gross lees. I started fermentation on November 18, so fermentation took about 18 days. The cider is working in two five-gallon containers. Although I inoculated 11 gallons of juice, I used the extra gallon to top up the two other containers after the racking, which reduced the volume of both somewhat.

Having used two different yeast strains (see the last post on the subject of hard cider for details), and having left the two batches in different parts of the house (one warmer than the other), the batch using the White Labs yeast, in the cooler location, was slightly behind the other, but bubbling has mostly stopped in both containers--although it's been so cold the past few days, even in the house, that lower temperatures may have suspended what final activity there was in both cases, activity that will have to start again once the liquid is bottled and a little sugar added back to feed a second, in-bottle fermentation to create carbonation in the finished product. So far, the White Labs batch tastes noticeably better than the other. I'm not sure exactly why. It may just be the slight amount of residual sugar in the White Labs vessel. Both have a slight hydrogen sulfide smell, however, which is not desirable--although I think  easily corrected. Hydrogen sulfide production is usually the result of inadequate yeast nutrients during fermentation. I did use the recommended dose of Fermaid K as well as DAP (diammonium phosphate), which together are supposed to prevent hydrogen sulfide production. It's time to call The Beverage People for advice. It's still much too early to know what the finished cider will be like.

Rain: Another 0.75 Inches

A little rain in the past few days (mostly on December 6) has added 0.75 inches to our 2013-2014 total. We have had only 2.80 inches so far at my location in Santa Rosa, which is well below normal--more than 5 inches below normal for the first week of December.

Tidbits: RIP--Nelson Mandela (December 5, 2013)

Just to note that Nelson Mandela died today. I vividly remember the day he was released from prison after--what was it, 27 years? I happened to be in London on the day and had gone to Trafalgar Square for some reason. I remember standing in front of St. Martin-in-the-Fields, looking out over the square. It was full of cheering people. Many had climbed up on statues and walls and lampposts. I must have come up out of the underground, not knowing what was going on. It was a bizarre scene. It made sense only after someone told me what had happened, what the excitement was about. Nelson Mandela. RIP.

Found Art: Eared Disc on Market St. (November 26, 2013)

Crossing Market St. in San Francisco on the weekend, I saw a yellow disc with "ears" painted on the street--a marking I've never encountered before. I have no idea what it means, but it looked like art to me. Maybe you'll find it, too.

For more unintended art, see my blog Serendipitous Art.

Art I'm Looking At: Frog and Toad and the World of Arnold Lobel at the Contemporary Jewish Museum

Saturday (November 23, 2013) I spent the day in San Rafael and San Francisco. In the morning, I delivered a couple of collages to the San Rafael gallery that will be showing them over the holidays. In the afternoon, I went to the Contemporary Jewish Museum to see a show of works by children's book illustrator Arnold Lobel before heading to the Legion of Honor to see the Anders Zorn show.

The Lobels (Arnold and his wife Anita, also a book illustrator) lived near my family in Brooklyn when I was a child. I played with their children, Adam and Adrianne (known as Belia), from time to time in the park. My mother remembers Arnold sketching in ruled notebooks as he watched us play. A couple of these notebooks are included among the exhibits. I remember receiving an autographed copy of Anita Lobel's Sven's Bridge from the Lobels as a child. So it was with a special sense of connection that I went to see the show. That said, I really had no idea of the range of Arnold Lobel's work, nor did I understand its quality. Last time I saw any of it I was a child, and I'd never had the opportunity to see original drawings before. As an adult, I can now appreciate Lobel's importance as an illustrator.

The work on display is impressive. Most of the drawings are done in graphite, ink, and watercolor. They are masterful, showing an extraordinary confidence. Well worth a visit, if you're in the area. The Contemporary Jewish Museum is at 736 Market Street (415 655-7800, or info@thecjm.org). The Lobel show runs through March 23, 2014, organized by the Contemporary Jewish Museum in collaboration with The Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art, Amherst, Massachusetts.

"There Was an Old Pig with a Pen," illustration from The Book of Pigericks (1983). Graphite, ink, and watercolor on paper. © The Estate of Arnold Lobel. 

Art I'm Looking At: Anders Zorn at The Legion of Honor (November 23, 2013)

Anders Zorn (1860-1920) is a name I've long been dimly aware of. On travels in Europe I've seen a few of his paintings and I've been impressed by them, but until today I'd never had the opportunity to see a full range of his work. It was a treat to see a representative selection of his early efforts – mostly extraordinary watercolors –, of his society portraits, of his nudes (oils, watercolors, and etchings), and also of his later works, which are mostly oils depicting rural scenes in his home country of Sweden, to which he retired after periods of living in London, Paris, and elsewhere, and doing a great deal of traveling around the world, including seven trips to the United States (which included a visit to San Francisco in 1903).

According to the large, wall-mounted text panels at the show, Zorn studied mostly oil painting as an art student, but a chance meeting with an English watercolorist shortly after graduation inspired him to take up watercolors, and he seems to have applied himself with singular concentration. The early watercolors on show at the Legion of Honor in San Francisco (Anders Zorn: Sweden's Master Painter runs through February 2, 2014) are nothing short of breathtaking technically, if somewhat idiosyncratic; Zorn uses watercolors more like oil paints, employing thickeners and adding touches with gouache to create heavy (but by no means clumsy) layers with less transparency, less wetness, than is usual. Zorn must have been an especially meticulous and patient man, at least in his youth. The detail of the water surface in a painting like Summer Vacation (1886) shown here is hard to believe. The figure in the boat is almost photographically rendered. If Zorn had lived in a later period, it's tempting to think he might have become a photorealist.

Zorn took up etching fairly casually, at the suggestion of an artist friend, the panels tell us. He seems to have mastered it in a very short time. His ability to capture light effects – so ably demonstrated in the watercolors – is apparent here, and again Zorn's approach is somewhat unorthodox. On the Sands (1916) pictured above (although not in the Legion of Honor show) is a good example of the style he developed as an etcher, using very long, parallel hatching to conjure startlingly life-like figures out of what look like hastily worked backgrounds (the freedom of line here and in some of the oil paintings is surprising when juxtaposed with the painstaking watercolor work). Remarkably, some of the lines are a third or even half as long as the long side of the plate. The woman on the beach looks as if she's been carefully carved out of a jagged stone matrix. Looking at other work in the show, this contrast between loving attention to a central figure and a less-meticulous rendering of a background began to seem typical as I walked through the galleries. The "floated" effect created by a figure rendered so surely as to look almost alive surrounded by a markedly more sketchily approached background is apparent in some of the oil paintings as well--notably Herdsmaid (1908) in which a young female cowherd (partially obscured by pine saplings and other low vegetation) is seen through a gap in the plants around her; the figure seems uncannily present, but what surrounds her is ever-so-slightly blurred – again suggestive of photography and lens effects (more below).

Zorn was immensely successful as a society portrait painter, both in Europe and on his trips to the United States. Looking at Zorn's work in the genre, the paintings of nearly contemporary painters John Singer Sargent (1856-1925) and Valentin Serov (1865-1905) immediately come to mind. These painters all had an uncanny ability to capture something about sitters that make their portraits look absolutely authentic while using brushstrokes that call great attention to themselves if viewed from close to the canvas. An entire room in the Legion of Honor show is devoted to portraits like this one of Elizabeth Sherman Cameron (1900).

The orange-red of the sofa in the Cameron portrait is a color Zorn appears to have liked very much. This (or a similar shade – the raw flesh of a Coho Salmon and the red sandstones of Arches National Park, in Utah, come to mind) is present in every one of the paintings in the portrait room – in the red bow in a sitter's hair, in the glowing, rusty curtains behind the former president in Zorn's portrait of Grover Cleveland (1899), or in a piece of furniture or clothing. In his Self-portrait in Red (1915), at the top of this page, Zorn took his predilection to an extreme.

Being a photographer, I was particularly interested to see the show touch upon how Zorn used photography as a resource in at least some of his later work. The etching called Cabin, of 1917, has its own display case. An example of the print is set alongside the original plate from which it was pulled and a set of five snapshots Zorn made of the two models depicted descending into the cabin of what is described as "Zorn's yacht" (his society portraits appear to have made him very rich). The photos are fascinating in themselves. The women are laughing. They seem to be having a great deal of fun. It's easy to imagine Zorn joking with the models, getting them to take the positions he was trying to visualize, in the right light, without making them unduly self-concious. Seeing the snapshots makes me wonder how often Zorn was drawing on photographs earlier in his career and exactly how he may have used them, if he did.

This work and the other nudes in the show (there are many, mostly oils) makes apparent the artist's love of the female form. He appears to have been especially fond of rear ends, and in the Legion of Honor show are some of the most lovingly rendered backsides you're ever likely to see in paint. Look for the one Zorn slashed to pieces and discarded because he was dissatisfied with it (a fellow artist rescued the pieces and sewed it back together).

Zorn retired to his home town of Mora and spent his last years mainly painting the country life of Sweden's Dalarna region – paintings that appealed to me less than some of the other pieces in the show (although everything was worth looking at). Here I've posted just a few impressions based on a single viewing of a selection of Zorn's work, but Zorn is a painter I'm now interested in learning more about.

Miscellaneous: 50 Years Since the Kennedy Assassination (November 22, 2013)

I imagine many of the people in the United States old enough to remember that day are thinking back on this 50th anniversary of the Kennedy assassination. On Facebook people are asking their friends the inevitable questions--"Where were you?" and "What were you doing when you heard about it?"
People standing in line at Costco are probably doing the same thing, strangers sharing stories. Have you tweeted something about it on Twitter?

I was three years, seven months old on the day Kennedy was killed. My memories of that day are sketchy, dream-like, but November 22, 1963 is the first day in my life that I have memories of.

We lived in Brooklyn. Our six-storey brick apartment building had a small flight of stairs from the street to the front door. My mother and I had been down the street, shopping for groceries. My mother was carrying a brown bag of groceries. As we approached the stairs to the building, Sue, one of our neighbors, suddenly came out the front door. The image I have is of her lips moving, but no words come out. Sue was the mother of my best friends. Clearly, though, something she says upsets my mother. Our apartment was at the end of a long hallway. We somehow find ourselves at our apartment, although we never walk down the hall. The key is in the lock. My mother steps across the front room to the TV and turns the knob to switch it on. That is strange. The TV is never a priority. It's never on in the afternoon. She never turns the TV on the moment she enters the apartment. Next I see my mother sobbing in front of the TV, kneeling on the floor in front of the small black-and-white screen, still clutching the bag of groceries. I don't know what's going on, but clearly something is wrong.....

That's how I remember it*. Memory is a tricky thing. It may not have happened that way, but these images are nevertheless an integral part of my personal history. In the following days, I keep hearing the name Lee Harvey Oswald. It becomes as familiar as the name of a relative. Conflated are images of the eternal flame at Kennedy's grave, which for many years as a child, I mistakenly believed was somewhere in our neighborhood, at Grand Army Plaza. Beyond that, I cannot separate actual memories from what I know about the assassination as an adult.

*[I asked my mother about what she remembers. She points out that I would have been at day care when news of the assassination broke. So, the way I remember the day is impossible. She says she heard the news from Sue when she went over to Sue's apartment to give her daughter, my playmate, a birthday present. So, what I remember must have been from later in the same day.]

I believe the photo above to be in the public domain. I was unable to find an attribution for a photo credit.

Wines I'm Making: Pressing Apples for Cider

Last Sunday we pressed apples for hard cider. Earlier this year, I made cider by fermenting store-bought organic apple juice (Sonoma County is blessed with many apple orchard, so excellent juice is easy to come by), but this year I decided to make cider from scratch. I rented an apple mill to process 200lbs of apples harvested from our own tree, a tree at my brother's home, and a tree belonging to a friend. I used about 70lbs of Golden Delicious apples (sweet, but low in acid), about 90lbs of Pink Lady apples from our own tree (sweet but quite tart as well, very aromatic), and about 40lbs of an unknown, older tree, in Sebastopol, probably planted in the 1960s, although not a Gravenstein, the apple most closely associated with Sebastopol (again tart and aromatic). The result was a good blend, I hope--sweet enough to make a fairly alcoholic cider (the juice tested at 17 degrees Brix, which should result in an alcohol level of about 8.5%), but also with enough tartness and apple aroma to keep things interesting. The top photo shows the raw material.

It took the entire day. Most of the time was consumed washing apples. Apparently commercial juice and cider makers don't bother, but I wanted at least to get the dust and occasional splatter of bird droppings off the fruit.  Once cleaned, it was just a matter of dropping apples into a chute above a rotating masher that pulps them and drops them into a press basket for pressing. Two-hundred pounds of apples yielded about 12 gallons of juice. One gallon I gave to the friends with the Golden Delicious tree. The rest I sulfited lightly and let rest overnight. That juice is now fermenting in the living room, well on its way to becoming cider. The second photo shows juice samples--Golden Delicious, unknown Sebastopol, and Pink Lady, left to right.

I used two different yeasts. On Monday afternoon (November 18) I inoculated five gallons with the same yeast I used to make the cider from store-bought apple juice--WLP775 "English Cider Yeast" made by White Labs, in San Diego (I hope that's not Walter White Labs), a liquid yeast in a glass vial. The remaining six gallons I inoculated with a powdered yeast from Mangrove Jack's--"Craft Series MO2 Cider yeast." It will be interesting to see if the two yeast strains produce different results. The liquid yeast has so far produced a much more vigorous fermentation. I filled the containers somewhat too full. I've had to repeatedly empty the air lock of bubbles and juice spilling out the top of the White Labs fermentation, making something of a mess, but it's all under control now. The juice fermenting with the Mangrove Jack's yeast hasn't been quite so exuberant. I expect the initial fermentation to take about three weeks or so in either case. For now, it's a waiting game.

Art I'm Making: Small Works Show at Art Works Downtown, San Rafael (November 29, 2012 - January 3, 2014)

Two of my collages have been accepted for inclusion in a juried show of small art works in San Rafael over the holidays (November 29, 2013 to January 3, 2014), in the main gallery (also known as Gallery 1337) at Art Works Downtown (1337 Fourth St., San Rafael, CA 94901-- (415) 451-8119, or artworksdowntown.org).

There were about 400 submissions, I'm told. Mine were two of only 83 accepted--somewhat ironically. I say somewhat ironically because these are not representative of my work, which has long been focused (excuse the pun) more on photography and printmaking. I began making collages only in July this year. That said, I've been pleased with what I've done and most people who have seen my collages have responded well. If you're in the San Rafael area over the holidays, I hope you'll have a look--although they will disappear if they sell.... There will be a reception at the gallery from 5:00PM-8:00PM on December 13. The image in the top-right corner on the postcard pictured here is one of mine--kind of hard to see, but it gets bigger if you click on the card--or, use the Art I'm Making label here (to the right) to see more of my collage work.

Miscellaneous: Signs of the Times (literally)

In Sebastopol, California I recently saw this sign in front of a small shopping center. I had to look at it carefully to decipher it. In fact, I had to stop and get out of my car to get a good look at it and to understand what it was trying to tell me (I've isolated it from its background here, but this is a photo of the actual sign at roadside).

I mention it mainly because it's new (I've never seen this type of sign before) and because it uses a symbol (top, center) that underscores how important computers and wireless technology have become.

But is this a good sign? The knife and fork are easy to see--and easy to interpret: Food available here. The coffee cup, indicating a coffee shop, I assume, makes sense too. The icon at the top is relatively familiar now to anyone who uses the Internet--wi-fi available here--but the dot and waves would have mystified many people not too many years ago. The glass started me wondering. I've decided it's specifically a beer glass (because it's squat and appears to have a head) but that it's probably intended to indicate alcoholic beverages generally, without suggesting hard liquor (which presumably would have called for a cocktail glass icon).

The bass clef seems an odd choice. It suggests music, naturally, but are we to understand this as indicating a place to buy recorded music, a place to listen to music, a place to make music? And why a bass clef? Is the music here typically of a low pitch? I suspect the G-clef is much more familiar to most people. I remain uncertain about the intention here, and I wonder if this sign is a Sebastopol thing? It appears to be a bona fide road sign, as opposed to a privately commissioned advertisement for the shopping center or its tenants. Has anyone seen one of these anywhere else? Let me know in the comments below.

The sign above seems very modern, the locomotive sign pictured at left, in contrast, is a vestige. This sign may on rare occasions alert drivers to a possible encounter with an actual steam locomotive, but mostly signs like this one persist at rail crossings that for many years have seen nothing but diesel engines (or no engines at all). The steam locomotive sign is a kind of fossil, a leftover that reminds us of obsolete technology. Nevertheless, we interpret the image as a warning about possible train traffic, even if it's a more modern kind of train traffic we're likely to encounter.

Rain: First Substantial Rain of the 2013-2014 Rainy Season (November 18-20, 2013)

It's been terribly dry this autumn. Until last night (the night of the 18th), we'd had only 0.85 inches of rain since July 1, the start of the 2013-2014 rainy season. Overnight we got 0.15 inches, for a total of 1.00 inches, but this afternoon it finally began to rain in earnest. From the sound of things, I expect to find a couple of inches in the rain gauge tomorrow morning. This rain has made our cat miserable, but it's very welcome to us humans around here.

[Update: Checking the rain gauge on the morning of the 20th, we got an additional 1.05 inches, bringing the total to 2.05 inches so far this year. Normal for this date is a little over five inches, so we are about three inches behind already.]

Wines I'm Drinking: 2010 Carmen Casablanca Valley Gran Reserva Chardonnay

When I lived in Tokyo, the wines of Carmen, one of Chile's best-known producers, were readily available and I often drank them, but I infrequently see them here, so I decided to try a bottle of the 2010 Carmen Casablanca Valley Gran Reserva Chardonnay when it showed up recently at my local Grocery Outlet. I remember Carmen as a maker of inexpensive but good-value wines, and this one was typical in that respect. Brief tasting notes follow.

A very pretty, pale gold. Looks bright and inviting. Nose is suggestive of resiny pineapple and very ripe melon with dusky floral scents (hawthorne, or pear blossom). Vanilla. Later some sappy scents. Fresh and appealing. Slightly unctuous, rich fruit on the palate tempered by bright acidity. Despite the fruit, the overall impression is one of reserve rather than opulence because of the strong acidity. A little tannic grip as well. Quite concentrated with a long finish that goes back and forth between the ripe melon flavors and the tart acidity. Hints of butterscotch at the very end. Later I was getting something spicy that put me in mind of cinnamon. Normally retails for $14-$17, but I paid $4.99 for it--and I judge it well worth the modest price.

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

Wines I'm Making: Cider Again, But This Time Using Fresh Apples

Last February I made some very tasty hard cider by fermenting store-bought organic apple juice. This year our apple tree had a lot of fruit, so I thought I'd try making cider from scratch, using apples from the tree. These pictured are "Pink Lady" apples from our back yard. Tomorrow we pick up a rented apple press and some more apples from my brother and from a couple of friends with trees. I figure we'll need about 200 pounds to make it worthwhile. 200 pounds of apples should yield about 10 gallons of juice. That will translate into 107 12-ounce bottles with a retail value of about $140. Renting the machine costs $45. The yeast costs about $8. So, for a little more than $50 (discounting time and labor) we'll get a more or less three-fold return. Hope it all goes well. More soon....

Miscellaneous: Funny License Plate

I recently found myself parked behind this license plate lamenting the excessive size of SUVs. It was on the back of a very old (tiny) Honda Civic, which made it especially funny.