[ Lost in the Landscape ]

morning drizzle

This morn­ing the run­ners in the Rock ‘n’ Roll Marathon are tak­ing to the streets down the hill from me. It’s over­cast and cool enough, for sure. But some­how I’m not feel­ing moti­vated to run 26 miles…

The locals have a name for these two months when the morn­ing cloud cover blots out the sun: May gray and June gloom. It makes for a slow eas­ing into sum­mer, good run­ning weather, and pro­longs the sea­son when you can hope to put plants in the ground and not have to worry too much about keep­ing them watered.

Yes­ter­day was extra-cool, and the thick marine layer of clouds made for a heavy driz­zle most of the day. For me the sight of rain­drops on plants is rare enough that I grabbed the camera.

Are pho­tos of rain­drops and dew­drops on plants and flow­ers cliches? Dunno. Even if they are, I think there’s some­thing so sat­is­fy­ing about them that peo­ple need to keep tak­ing them.

Below are all the pho­tos I took in smaller gallery for­mat. Going left to right: images 1–4, flow­ers of sacred datura, Datura wrightii; 5–6, leaves on tower of jew­els, Echium wild­pretii; 7, spi­der­web on Cal­i­for­nia fuch­sia, Epi­lo­bium canum ‘Catalina’; 8, flow­ers of deer­weed, Lotus sco­par­ius.

May 31 2009 | Categories: gardening • my garden | Tags: Datura wrightii • Echium wildpretii • Epilobium Catalina • native plants • rain | 6 Comments »

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 »