August 4, 2018 at 3:43 pm (Artists and Writers, Books, Explorers, Recommended, Surprises, Traveling)
Tags: art, biographies, essay, history, memories, museums, Paris, review, Saturday, The New Yorker
- In Renaissance Florence, a number of designated boxes placed throughout the city allowed citizens to make anonymous denunciations of various moral crimes — in 1461, for example, the artist-monk Filippo Lipi was accused of fathering a child with a nun.
— Claudia Roth Pierpoint, “Angels and Men” in The New Yorker (16 October 2017)
The article is a review of the Walter Isaacson biography of Leonardo da Vinci, called Leonardo da Vinci. One of the biggest surprises in the piece is the discovery that “one of the last remaining complete notebooks, the Codex Leicester,” is in the possession of Microsoft founder Bill Gates. Also: “Leonardo was illegitimate, gay, vegetarian, left-handed, easily distracted . . . ”
Dear blog readers, last year self saw the Mona Lisa. It was May or June. A Spanish woman asked self whether she knew where the famous painting was located. Then she asked a museum guard, and the two of us went looking together. And we found it. And she asked self to take pictures of her standing in front of it. And insisted on taking a few of self.
And here’s a wide-angle shot of the gallery housing the Mona Lisa and then self making a horrible face because, honestly, she dislikes having her picture taken (not when the humidity has done things to her hair) and the crowded gallery full of people aiming their cell phones in one direction was so disorienting.
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
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July 23, 2018 at 11:59 pm (Artists and Writers, Books, destinations, Places, Traveling, Women Writers)
Tags: Annaghmakerrig, Cork, Dublin, Garden, Ireland, London, Manila, memories, Mondays, museums, Paris, Redwood City, San Francisco, Tyrone Guthrie Centre
Self started reading a new book this afternoon: Manderley Forever: A Biography of Daphne du Maurier, by Tatiana de Rosnay. It begins with the most fabulous quote.
- People and things pass away, not places. — Daphne du Maurier
The quote really got her thinking about a few of her favorite places. She decided to share pictures with dear blog readers.
The Art and Natural History Museum, University of Santo Tomas
Paradiso, Cork: Early November, 2017
Display Window, Cow’s Lane, Dublin: 9 November 2017
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
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July 19, 2018 at 6:22 pm (Artists and Writers, destinations, Family, Food and Drink, Lists, Places, Recommended)
Tags: art, desserts, exhibits, happiness, museums, praise, restaurants, San Francisco
Self has seen it three times.
The Magritte-themed food in the fifth floor café is so much fun:
In the adjoining sculpture garden, you can pose in front of this sign and you will look fabulous and so ‘San Francisco’:
Andrew and Jennie, 14 July 2018
There is a great, really great interactive portion at the end: Raise your arms, and YOU’RE the Magritte!
More later. Stay tuned!
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July 17, 2018 at 7:47 pm (Artists and Writers, destinations, Family, Links, Places)
Tags: art, Cee Neuner, happiness, memories, museums, San Francisco, Saturday
Self’s entry for Cee Neuner’s Fun Foto Challenge this week (She invites us to derive what inspiration we can from a new photo every week — quite an interesting challenge!)
You can see the photo for Week 2 here. It’s a vivid picture: a wall mural in bright colors, a vintage truck with a raised hood.
Self chose to focus on the colors. And, as luck would have it, she doesn’t have to search for very long before she stumbles on just the right pictures.
Last Saturday, son and his wife flew up from Orange County and we spent a day in the City. SO. MUCH. FUUUUN! Self had been raving about the Magritte exhibit at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art since forever. So that became our first stop.
We stopped for refreshments at the 5th floor café, and posed for pictures in the sculpture garden:
Andrew and Jennie, 14 July 2018
Here’s one last: Andrew and Jennie having fun at the interactive portion of the exhibit. The screen they’re staring at is bright blue, son is wearing a black sweater, and Jennie’s wearing a blue hoodie. So that’s an acceptable interpretation of the photo challenge, right? Not to mention: the cords for the audio guide are orange!
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 14 July 2018
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
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July 6, 2018 at 5:01 am (Books, destinations, Memoirs, Traveling)
Tags: humor, John Steinbeck, museums, nonfiction, reading lists, summer, travel books
I’ll tell you what it was like. Go to the Ufizzi in Florence, the Louvre in Paris, and you are so crushed with the numbers, once the might of greatness, that you go away distressed, with a feeling like constipation.
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June 26, 2018 at 9:43 pm (Artists and Writers, destinations, Movies, Recommended)
Tags: art, exhibits, museums, Redwood City, San Francisco, summer, summer movies, thrillers
Summer: SO MANY THINGS, from the Magritte exhibit at SFMOMA, to the Rube Goldberg exhibit at the Jewish Contemporary Art Museum on Mission St., to the Redwood City Century 20, where we saw Jurassic Park last weekend (Bryce Dallas Howard forever!)
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June 12, 2018 at 8:51 pm (Artists and Writers, destinations, Links, Places)
Tags: art, Cee Neuner, exhibits, museums, San Francisco
Cee’s current Fun Foto Challenge is COLUMNS and VERTICAL LINE(S). Cee’s own photos are fantastic.
Here are two of self’s:
- The Magritte exhibit at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art is one of the best exhibits she’s seen in recent years. It ends with an interactive gallery where viewers can insert themselves into a Magritte landscape. Here’s a forest:
- Across the street from the museum is Yerba Buena Park which has this beautiful fountain. So relaxing to watch the COLUMNS of water.
Yerba Buena Gardens, San Francisco
Thank you to Cee Neuner for the wonderful Foto Challenge!
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
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May 20, 2018 at 5:05 pm (Artists and Writers, destinations, Food and Drink, postaday, Recommended, Sundays, Surprises)
Tags: art, coffee, exhibits, humor, museums, postaday, postaweek, Redwood City, San Francisco, Wordpress
Bright and early Saturday morning, self was in front of SFMOMA. She had tickets for the opening day of the Rene Magritte exhibit. There was a crowd waiting for the doors to open at 10 a.m.
Below was one of the first Magrittes she saw. Of course, she immediately thought: THE DAILY POST PHOTO CHALLENGE! Good thing they allowed pictures.
Rene Magritte at SFMOMA
This morning, self had her usual cup of coffee: Organic Rendezvous Brew, purchased at Moody’s in Mendocino. The cup she used was something she bought at the Academy of Sciences in Golden Gate Park, years ago: that’s a triceratops, half-submerged in her coffee:
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
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April 13, 2018 at 5:39 pm (Artists and Writers, Books, Personal Bookshelf, Recommended)
Tags: art, exhibits, Fridays, memories, museums, natural history
The only hardcover self allowed herself to bring home from London last year: David Attenborough’s Amazing Rare Things: The Art of Natural History in the Age of Discovery.
She bought it from the London Review Bookshop in June 2017 and only now, almost a year later, in Mendocino, is she able to give it a focused reading.
Figure 22: The American Flamingo by John James Audubon
Fig. 22 in the book AMAZING RARE THINGS, by David Attenborough
This is an amazing work by Audubon. Attenborough writes:
Audubon, who from the age of eighteen lived in Pennsylvania where he looked after family property, was obsessed by birds. His quest for them led him to travel ever westwards in search of new species. He hunted them with an unquenchable passion and he drew them with equal enthusiasm.
His biggest inspiration was to draw birds in motion. The next part is a little gross but anyhoo, Leonardo da Vinci did similar things to study animal anatomy. Da Vinci of course did not SHOOT animals, but he dissected as many as he could lay his hands on.
Audubon would shoot (shoot as in: kill) his subjects, then take the freshly killed bird back home, where he’d fix them on a board with a pre-drawn square grid. Then he’d manipulate “the bird’s wings and neck into what he considered life-like attitudes” and fix “them in position with skewers. The process must have been a fairly blood-spattered one . . . ”
Several years ago, self had occasion to visit Pasadena, and she dropped by the Huntington Library, where on exhibit were Audubon’s magnificent double elephant folio. Jaw-dropping. Amazing. An American National Treasure. Self knew Audubon was a painter of birds, but until she saw the elephant folio, she had no idea of the magnitude of his vision.
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
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February 23, 2018 at 10:13 pm (Artists and Writers, destinations, Places, postaday, Traveling)
Tags: art, Fridays, London, museums, Paris, postaday, postaweek, Wordpress
Love this week’s Daily Post Photo Challenge. Self has tons of “faces in the crowd” pictures. TONS.
Here are three more:
- Waterloo Bridge, June 2017
- The Crowd in Front of the Mona Lisa, May 2017: This has to be seen to be believed. As you probably can guess, the Mona Lisa is on the left.
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
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