Seattle Day Trip: To Reifel Migratory Bird Sanctuary
March 6, 2015
Last week I accompanied my friend Bonnie and her husband on a day trip to the George C. Reifel Bird Sanctuary in British Columbia. This was my first trip to this refuge, and it was a spectacular place for walking groomed trails and watching birds. They do allow visitors to feed the birds (they sell birdseed), so many birds seem accustomed to people and you can get very close. This was wonderful for making photographs. I find it very difficult to take pictures of birds because they move so quickly and it is hard to anticipate their moves. Too often my photos look like this:
Here are some of my better photographs of the wild birds and views within the sanctuary:
We were very lucky because a vagrant Great Gray Owl had made a temporary stop at the sanctuary. The owl had settled in a non-public area, but the staff took people back in small groups to see it — a rare sighting of this wild bird.
An exhibit featuring Georgia O’Keeffe paintings just opened at the Tacoma Art Museum. Her paintings, which focus on some of her New Mexico still lifes, are juxtaposed with those from Pacific Northwest artists. This exhibit has travelled here from Indianapolis and the Tacoma Art Museum is the only West coast venue for this show. So it is well worth a day trip to check it out.
Georgia O’Keeffe (1887−1986), Yellow Cactus, 1929. Oil on canvas, 30 × 42 inches. Dallas Museum of Art, Texas. Patsy Lacy Griffith Collection, Bequest of Patsy Lacy Griffith. 1998.217. (O’Keeffe 675) © 2015 Georgia O’Keeffe Museum / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Courtesy International Arts ®.
I like this article in which the Indianapolis Museum of Art talks about still life painting:
Rarely do we think of still life painting as depictions of a specific area, which is why Georgia O’Keeffe and the Southwestern Still Life is such a unique and important exhibition.”
I am very fond of Georgia O’Keeffe’s art, and I was particularly pleased with this new exhibit which featured several of her paintings that I had never before seen in person or reproduced in books such as a cockscomb and a wooden virgin. Here are some of the other new (to me) paintings:
Georgia O’Keeffe (1887−1986), Mule’s Skull with Pink Poinsettia, 1936. Oil on canvas, 401⁄8 × 30 inches. Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, Santa Fe, New Mexico. Gift of The Burnett Foundation. 1997.06.014. (O’Keeffe 876) © 2015 Georgia O’Keeffe Museum / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Courtesy International Arts ®.
Georgia O’Keeffe (1887−1986), Deer Horns, 1938. Oil on canvas, 36 × 16 inches. Collection of Louis Bacon. (O’Keeffe 941) Photography by Christie’s Images. © 2015 Georgia O’Keeffe Museum / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Courtesy International Arts
You can read more about this exhibit from this article in the Los Angeles Times.
While you are at the Tacoma Art Museum, be sure to wander through its new addition, which houses “Art of the American West: the Haub Family Collection.” It includes another new (to me) O’Keeffe painting, Pinons with Cedar, 1956.
Georgia O’Keeffe (American, 1887 ‑ 1986)
Piñons with Cedar, 1956
Oil on canvas
30 × 26 inches
Tacoma Art Museum, Haub Family Collection, Gift of Erivan and Helga Haub, 2014.6.91
© 2014 Georgia O’Keeffe Museum / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
Road Trips and the Mind
August 3, 2014
“Carried along on the hum of the motor and the countryside passing by, the journey itself flows through you and clears your head. Ideas one held on to without any reason depart; others, however, are readjusted and settle like pebbles at the bottom of a stream. There’s no need to interfere; the road does that work for you. One would like to think that it stretches out like this, dispensing its good offices, not just to the ends of India but even further, until death.”
— Nicolas Bouvier, The Way of the World
This has been a vacation-less summer for me, and I’ve been craving a getaway. This weekend my husband and I took a daytrip to a few ocean beaches on the Olympic Peninsula. We drove from sun up to sun down — a long day — but relaxing in the way Bouvier describes in the quote above, the miles stringing along with free-flowing thoughts and impressions. The day was a tonic.
We explored two beaches I had never been to before near La Push on the Pacific coast and Rialto Beach where I had taken my niece last year. Our summer weather has been hot and sunny lately, but interestingly, a fog bank had settled right where the water met the land, and it stayed cool and gray on the beaches. We could barely make out the silhouettes of sea stacks off shore. Still, being by the ocean was restorative — the fresh smells of salt and wet sand, the rhythmic crashing of the waves.
Yesterday I travelled by bus across Lake Washington to see the origami exhibit at the Bellevue Arts Museum, which is an easy stroll from the Bellevue Transit Center. The exhibit, “Folding Paper: Infinite Possibilities of Origami,” runs through September 21st. I love papercraft of all kinds, and this exhibit showcases the intricacies and magic of folded paper. Many of the pieces on display were constructed from a single sheet of paper. I can’t begin to comprehend the vision, engineering skills, and artistry needed to create such amazing art objects. I was astounded and delighted by these imaginative works.
I learned that paper folding has real-life applications that go way beyond creating art objects. Scientists who want to transport large objects, like sun shields or telescope lenses, into space might engineer a folded apparatus to save space during the haul, only to be unfolded at its destination in space. Or doctors might transport tiny folded repair materials through a blood vessel, to be unfolded and applied as a heart stent. Think of the miraculous properties of the air bags in your car — another piece of origami-like engineering.
You can read more about the origami in this exhibit in a book, Folding Paper: The Infinite Possibilities of Origami by Meher McArthur and Robert J. Lang.
Painting at Gordon Skagit Farms
October 9, 2013
Yesterday I took a drive to the Skagit Valley to meet up with some women friends for a few hours of painting at Gordon Skagit Farms. This was my second trip to Gordon’s, which is open only during the month of October, and I hope to make it an annual tradition. I’ll write more about Gordon Skagit Farms in my next two posts, but for today, I will share the experience of making art with friends. The setting couldn’t be more convivial — Eddie Gordon displays his own paintings around the farm (quite an inspiration), we’re in the glorious countryside, and the sheer variety of pumpkins, gourds, and squashes is mind-boggling.