[ Lost in the Landscape ]

up the coast in the rain

Last night was the offi­cial open­ing of the exhi­bi­tion I’m in at the Can­non Gallery in Carls­bad, but the nice gallery folks had a lit­tle break­fast event for the artists ear­lier in the morning.

It rained lightly both head­ing north and back. Since rain is such a rare event in these parts, I got out my camera.

These two shots are of the wind­shield on the way back. Don’t worry–John was dri­ving. The first is with Inter­state 5 in the back­ground. The sec­ond is while we were being passed by a truck.

They’d set up a nice break­fast spread for us. With the meal being served at ten in the morn­ing, how­ever, we were all starv­ing artists. We dis­patched the edi­bles in almost no time.

And then it was finally time to go inside and pre­view the exhi­bi­tion. Here’s my wall in the exhi­bi­tion. Tonight there’ll prob­a­bly be a few hun­dred more peo­ple at the open­ing, so it won’t be so easy to doc­u­ment the exhi­bi­tion view.

The gallery itself is part of the com­plex that houses the Carls­bad Pub­lic Library. Land­scap­ing there is a mix of native sycamore trees and exotics–spiky sedges, bio­mor­phic hedges and myopo­rum for ground­cover. Like the library and gallery com­plex, it’s mod­ern with­out try­ing to be par­tic­u­larly avant-garde. Nicely done, I thought.

Run­ning around the perime­ter of the build­ings is a screen wall that is set sev­eral feet from the main walls of the com­plex. Join­ing the two are these over­head screens cut out of pati­nated metal. The branches on the screens curve in arabesques that reminded me of Art Nou­veau, but the tri­an­gu­lar frames give them a geo­met­ri­cal edge that joins them com­fort­ably with the architecture.

Isn’t it a shame most peo­ple are so busy look­ing down they never notice the branches–or artwork–overhead?

Post on the work in the show
The Can­non Gallery

December 14 2008 | Categories: art • gardening • landscape design • photography • places | Tags: exhibitions • food • Interstate 5 • rain • William D. Cannon Art Gallery | 2 Comments »

roadside flora

We’ve just returned from a cou­ple of days in L.A. The drive up and back isn’t one of the great scenic routes on earth, and for the most part it’s not par­tic­u­larly inter­est­ing botanically.

The plant­i­ngs of trees along I-5 and the 405 over 150 miles mostly draw from tried and true Cal­i­for­nia plant sta­ples like palms and euca­lyp­tus, with stands of Ital­ian cypress and occa­sional pines con­cen­trated in the more res­i­den­tial areas. They’re attrac­tive enough and gen­er­ally drought-tolerant choices, but the rhythm of palm, palm, euca­lyp­tus, palm, cypress, palm, euca­lyp­tus, palm gets a lit­tle rep­e­ti­tious over the course of two and a half hours (if traf­fic is moving).

A new kind of tree has been appear­ing over the last half dozen years, how­ever. With the recent growth of cell phones, there’s been an explo­sion in how many cell tow­ers you see–More bars in more places trans­lates into more cell tow­ers in more places. The providers have occa­sion­ally tried to hide the tow­ers by try­ing to make them pass as trees–usually with pretty com­i­cal results.

To keep myself amused on the trip I shot a few pho­tos of road­side trees. See if you can spot the cell tow­ers in the grid below. (Answers are at the end of this post, but I don’t think you’ll need the answer key.)

Give up? The cell tow­ers are the far right in the top row (fake palm), the first in the third row (fake…er…what is that sup­posed to be? a red­wood? road­side in South­ern Cal­i­for­nia?) and far right in the third row (plain vanilla cell tower). At least the cell tower trees are drought-tolerant.

August 25 2008 | Categories: landscape design • places | Tags: cell phones • cell towers • drought-tolerant landscaping • Interstate 405 • Interstate 5 • Los Angeles • Orange County • roadside plantings • trees | 1 Comment »