Peace Pole

I'm thinking of not telling you where this is. Some people will know, of course. But this is the sort of urban art the authorities love to remove, and I think it's kind of nice. It's human. Anyone can make one.

Bellis and I think there's something to it. She led me there, and there is where both of our dogs got confused. They suddenly couldn't hear us. I think Boz was faking, but maybe not.

Altadena Rocks

My friend's foot is in a cast. I went to visit. She gave me coffee and a fresh, homemade scone. Apparently she hasn't been staying off her feet 24/7.

But hobbling around the house is about all she can do, and her sweet, relatively large dog is being patient about it.

"Is he getting walks?" I asked.

"When I have a volunteer," she said.

You know the rest. I enjoyed a walk around a quiet, Altadena neighborhood with a dapper escort in the form of Kirby, the yellow lab. (I'm guessing about the spelling of his name. "Kerby" would be a pun. "Curby" would be a double pun.)

Smart dog. He knew not to pee on these rocks.

American Steel sculpture

"Ecstasy" was constructed by Karen Cusolito and Dan Das Mann in 2007 and used that year at Burning Man.  It stands 30 feet high and weighs 9 tons.  In 2010 the sculpture was installed for several months in a park in San Francisco's Hayes Valley neighborhood.  She now resides at the entrance of American Steel Studios in West Oakland where Cusolito has her work space and also rents studio and gallery space to over 100 artists and small businesses.

Crucible sculpture

The Crucible in West Oakland offers classes in industrial arts and all media related to fire.   Where else can you can find workshops in blacksmithing, glass blowing, and neon all under one roof?  Oh,  let's not forget fire dancing.  No surprise that they're a big presence at Burning Man.

more paste-ups

I really like the innovation and flexibility that the wheat paste medium allows an artist.  As with last week's piece, this no longer exists.  It seems to me that in general there are fewer paste-ups around town.

wheat paste art

This paste up is by Get Up.  He frequently glued them up on the BART piers in North Oakland.  Since renovations on the tracks began a year ago, all of the art pieces have disappeared or disintegrated.  I miss the innovation of Get Up's work.

Margaret Finnegan: Goddess of Inspiration

Today is release day! You can now buy a brand spankin' new copy of the brand spankin' new novel, The Goddess Lounge (paperback here), by South Pasadena's Margaret Finnegan. That is a beautiful thing, partly because I love Margaret and partly because I love The Goddess Lounge (ebook here). Also partly because Margaret inspires me.

Margaret's blog, Finnegan Begin Again, would be inspiration enough to read her novel because one always wants more of her unique writer's voice. But she's gone further by involving her readers in the processes of publication and promotion. We've been reading about goddesses, we voted on the book cover, and when it was time to make book trailers we contributed photos of ourselves being goddesses.

Margaret has created two (two!) book trailers. Here's one:


Here's the other:


I'm in the second one twice! The first photo you see is one John took of me. Plus, that's my voice, reading from Chapter Two. I'm honored to be included.

The publishing industry has changed so much in the past few years that publishing the book yourself has become the way to go, or it's certainly at least as viable as the traditional way.  I love what Margaret's doing. Her energy and innovative ideas inspire me, and I can't wait to get my copy of The Goddess Lounge.

The Birds Like the Stars

Last weekend's Knowledges at Mount Wilson Observatory was an ambitious exhibit of contemporary art, the Saturday portion of which sold out--okay with me, as I'm past my staying-up-late days. Because the exhibit was scheduled for the entire weekend, Bellis and I drove into the mountains on Sunday to see it.

Bellis and I especially liked this (plexiglass?) sculpture with three chambers: a lower, clear chamber, an upper chamber containing a complicated birds' nest, and a slim, top chamber with an inch or two of water in it. From one angle the sun shone through, from another you could see the solar telescope framed in the bottom chamber, from another angle, the bird's nest literally disappeared. From every direction, something new happened. Unfortunately, the piece wasn't labeled.

After deciding we liked the work very much, Bellis and I went on to walk around the Observatory. It looked like a lot of the works had been removed, but a trip to Mount Wilson is never wasted unless the place is closed, and even then you've had a relaxing mountain drive. A few interesting pieces remained, but I'd have been fine with it even if our plexiglass nest holder had been the only one still there.

Unfortunately, the brochure listed the artists but not their works, making it impossible to identify what works there were, as very little was labeled. But this is the first time they've done anything like this at Mount Wilson and I hope they do it again. I think it was pretty good for a first try. 

On our way out we stopped to visit our favorite piece again. By this time the sun was playing with the water in the top chamber. Hot yellow! Sugar pink! Searing blue! Bright green! Depending on where you stood you'd get a different flash of color, and we exclaimed like kids at the Fourth of July fireworks. "Ooh! Ah! Amazing!" We were thrilled with it; we kept moving around to all sides to see what it would do and where the sun would go. Oh! And how did the artist make that nest disappear?

A young man sat nearby taking pictures. So we asked, and yes, he was the artist. Otherwise I would not be able to tell you that this magical work is called "The Birds Like the Stars," and it was created by Claude Collins-Stracensky. I think he enjoyed our exclamations. It's art, of course, and as Collins-Stracensky hadn't declared his presence he could just as easily have overheard criticism. He said that's part of the fun. What a pleasure it was to meet him, and to be able to tell him honestly how much we liked his work. But he already knew that.

"This is a place of magic," the brochure says. They got that part exactly right.


(LOOKY! Pasadena Adjacent went Saturday night!)

Commute, 8

We're heading east on Silverlake Blvd. in Silver Lake, Los Angeles, approaching the corner of Reservoir St. This mural is on the back of what I think is still Tom's Burgers. Tom's is on a corner-shaped spit because really, where Silverlake meets Reservoir it also meets Parkman Avenue which, if we turn left on it, takes us behind ourselves to Sunset Blvd, under which we've just driven.

I love that sentence, even if you don't.

I didn't find out the name of the artist, but I did find Jubilee.


Update:
Thanks to Adele for discovering the name of the artist: Dcypher CBS. 

The Goose Lady

We love Toruń and we love its quirky statues and sculptures. There are literally dozens of them scattered all around the Old Town. One such addition is the sculpture of a medieval-clad woman holding a basket of eggs and a goose. Unfortunately, she's about to drop one of the eggs...oh no! It's not the Golden Egg is it?!!

Commute, 1

Last week folks reacted positively to the Anawalt elephant. I see a lot of interesting things on my Wednesday commute to Hollywood. I don't get to photograph all of them because I'm driving, but if and when traffic stops (and it does, oh yes it does), I pass my wait time taking pictures of the good stuff. So perhaps Thursday is a good time to post the shots I get on the Wednesday drive.

I took this one on Santa Monica Blvd. somewhere around the junction of Hollywood and Silverlake (the areas, not the boulevards). I haven't been down Santa Monica Blvd. lately so I'm not sure if it's still there. I'm glad I got it when I did.

I had this photo for a while before I noticed what was extra special about this artwork.

The Panel

Here is a close-up of an interesting relief panel in a building Toruń's Ul. Szeroka.

Change is Work

The work must be done. Changes must be made. Things were falling to ruin and it's time to reverse the entropy. Get rid of what doesn't work and replace it with something that does. Chop-chop. The deadline looms.

Even so, there's room for beauty if you make it.

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CDP bloggers: if you're concerned about theme day because the portal's not working, check out Julie's link. 

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More emails coming in today from people unable to comment on Blogger. Thank you all, and wish me luck! This weekend I attempt the move to Wordpress so we can get back to normal around here. I'm not a software genius so there are no guarantees, and I will need that luck.

Graffiti Mural

Artwork or graffiti? This is an interesting mural on the wall near the local morgue!

Ars Brevis

Bright colors haven't been the norm on this scraggle-spit of ground, where Foothill splits from Walnut to begin its eastern trek. I like this area, especially along Walnut: it's where small industries and artist studios set up shop, and you can find old train tracks along the north side of the road.

Now you can also find art. This work is called Planting a Garden. It's by Margaret Lazzari and Lauren Evans, and it's part of Pasadena's Rotating Public Art program. Medians and scraggle-spits like this one are just the spots for works such as this one. Watch for them at your favorite (or least favorite) median around town. Each piece is displayed for 18 months before it's rotated out and replaced with a new one.

This piece looked to be in fine condition when I stopped so I'm not sure what the caution tape was for. But this brings me to the fact that I stopped--stopped the car, got out, and looked up close. I recommend it. I like the piece as a whole, but I like the details even more. Click on the photos to enlarge them.

Plus, when you look closely, you can see the materials. I like knowing how this piece was put together and with what.

I also liked seeing how the location interacted, however tentatively, with the piece.

One of my favorite things about art is its subjectivity. No single work will please everyone. That's one of the many appealing things about this rotating program. Don't like the art? Don't worry. Just give it a little time.

Lincoln Heights: Art

There's art all over Lincoln Heights. Here's some of it.

We talked about Lincoln Park yesterday in the comments. I like this piece a lot, and not just because you can frame a tree with it. I like how the neighborhood rises beyond it, like its reason for being there.

If you turn around you see it's part of a larger artwork, The Wall las Memorias, the first publicly funded AIDS monument in the nation.

Roberta (Latino Heritage) mentioned this yesterday in the comments. You can see the horseshoe peeking out from behind it. It's actually not a horseshoe, but a design based on the AIDS awareness ribbon.

I don't know, do you call this art or architecture? Good architecture is art, after all. Maybe I should have put this in the architecture post from the other day. I like it a lot.

This mural has several panels. Karin posted another part, where the artists included pictures of themselves painting the mural. The whole thing is witty that way. I love how in this panel the artists incorporated the night deposit box as our hero's footrest.

I took a picture of the artist's signatures or I'd never remember that the mural was done in 1977 by Los Dos Streetscapers, David Botello and Wayne Healy, and renovated in 2006 by Paul Botello.

Lincoln Heights: Blessings

While in Lincoln Heights we stopped at Sacred Heart Church (est. 1897) for a few minutes and listened to the high school kids sing. The church was packed. It was noon-ish on a Wednesday. It was hard not to be charmed.

Sacred Heart School is across from the church. Karin tells the story of the mural here. It's about family and community, lives long and short and intertwined.

Manny estimates Lincoln Heights to be about 70% Hispanic (mostly of Mexican heritage), 20% Asian and 10% "everything else." Surely I'm generalizing, but 70% Hispanic/mostly Mexican is likely to mean a lot of Catholics.

Many of the markets in Lincoln Heights (except the Asian ones) have a representation of Our Lady of Guadalupe painted on the exterior. Always a lot of color; always Our Lady.

PLUS I CAN'T BELIEVE I FORGOT to include this in yesterday's post about Lincoln Heights architecture!

I haven't forgotten it's Thanksgiving, no indeed. I'm thankful every day for too many things to mention. Really, you don't want me to start. Once I get started I think of more and I can't stop.

So I'll just say here and in keeping with this post that I'm thankful for the diversity in our world and our nation, not to mention in Los Angeles and Pasadena and especially in my neighborhood of Northwest Pasadena. What a great place to live.

Happy Thanksgiving! May you have many blessings to count.

Grand Mosaic

This is  one of those things where if you know it's there it's no surprise, but if you don't, when you come upon it it's somehow incongruous.

I was of the latter persuasion, coming upon this and thinking, well, a modern tile mosaic is the last thing I expected above the entrance to underground parking.

I should make you guess where this is.

Maybe you already know?

It's at the north end of South Grand Avenue--the last building before the Colorado Street Bridge. It's nice to park there (on the street) and walk out onto the bridge for spectacular views and, right about now, some bracing wind. You can stop in the driveway for a bit of erudition on the way back to your car.

ABC Wednesday: P is for paste-up

Paste-ups are ephemeral art on paper mounted with wheat paste.  They are intended to be impermanent, with weather taking its toll over time.  One of the favorite places to hang these pieces is the BART support pillars in North Oakland.   All the paste-ups I photographed in February are now gone.  That includes this piece by Get Up.  For more takes on the letter "P" visit ABC Wednesday.

The Graffiti Face

Looking down from above is this artistically impressive blue graffiti face. The artwork can be found inside Toruń's Miasto train station...and I have no idea how long it's been up there. Nor do I know whether it's legal or not...but my guess is the latter. Graffiti is still a problem here in Poland...though for sure it has improved over the past 8 years.