Month: November 2024

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The de Young Museum

There is one art museum and one art exhibition from my youth that is at the fore of my memory.

I was in third grade when I visited San Francisco’s de Young Museum and the King Tutankhamen exhibit.

In 1979, the King Tut exhibit was a huge deal in the Bay Area. It seemed everyone had King Tut fever and wanted to see the treasures of his exhumed tomb.

The exhibit featured 55 objects including Tut’s golden death mask and sarcophagus. I have memories of marveling at the superb death mask.

The museum was founded in 1895. It moved to its present site in Golden Gate Park in 1919.

The building was damaged in the 1989 Loma Prieta Earthquake and was demolished. The museum was rebuilt in its current form in 2005.

Looking west from the tower with the galleries of the de Young.

I admit that I wasn’t a fan of the new building. But the view from the top is amazing. The building is slowly growing on me.

On a recent visit I did a western facing sketch from the top of the de Young tower of the Golden Gate and the Marin Headlands (below).

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Kirby Cove

On a November Saturday morning I decided to pop over the Golden Gate to one of my favorite places in the Bay Area: the Marin Headlands.

I spent 14 seasons as a hawk bander for the Golden Gate Raptor Observatory (GGRO) and I have spent many days in beautiful and sometimes foggy fall weather.

One call from other blinds would be, “RT heading towards Kirby Cove!” The RT is question stood for red-tailed hawk and Kirby Cove was my Saturday hiking/ sketching destination.

The distance from the parking lot on Conzelman Road to Kirby Cove Beach, as the hawk flies, is about a mile but the road from the trailhead takes a winding path downslope, to the beach.

The trail to the beach is a graded fire road that winds down to the Kirby Cove Campground. This proved to be easy hiking.

Who doesn’t love a bit of Radiolarian Chert in the morning?

From the trailhead to the beach took about 20 minutes. Before heading to the beach I looked for the Kirby Cove swing which had been taken down. I originally planned to sketch the view with the swing in the foreground. Well it was time for sketching Plan B.

I then headed to the beach and found a sketching seat on a piece of driftwood (a former power pole) and began sketching the view of the Golden Gate, the famous bridge, and the San Francisco skyline in the background.

Beachmaster!

Even thought the nearby campground was full, I had the beach entirely to myself during the duration of my visit.

A Princess cruise ship coming into the Golden Gate like so many gold seekers in 1849.
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SLO Sketches

I have always enjoyed sketching in San Luis Obispo. Its hard not to stray too far from the town’s railroad past.

SLO is at the base of Cuesta Grade on the former Southern Pacific’s Coast Division. The town, midway between San Francisco and Los Angeles, was a major division point on the railroad.

It was here that the roundhouse facilities employed 44 men at it’s peak. Trains heading north had to take on helpers to climb the Cuesta Grade (the steepest grade on the Coast Line). In the age of steam, SLO was a real railroad town.

In the present day, the passenger station and freight station (now a train museum) sit beside the Union Pacific mainline.

You have to look a little harder to find SLO’s steam past. South from the freight depot is the site of the 17 stall roundhouse. All that remains are the concrete semicircle foundation.

The roundhouse foundation looking north.

The last steam locomotive pulled out of the roundhouse in September of 1956. The roundhouse was torn down three years later.

On Sunday morning I sketched the remains of the roundhouse. There are plans in the works to develop the site as a Union Pacific maintenance facility. So this might be the last time I would be able to sketch the ghosts of steam’s past in SLO.

Another sketching location I was looking forward to adding to my sketchbook was a more recent part of the city’s history, the Sunset drive-in, opened in 1950.

What is amazing about this drive-in is that it’s still open. There are only 16 drive-ins still open in California and about 300 in existence nationwide. This is a steep decline of about the 4,000 drive-ins in the late 1950s, which was the zenith of outdoor movie going.

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Morro Rock

On a SLO Saturday morning with a breakfast at the Copper Cafe at the Madonna Inn (celebrity sighting: Steve Perry), Grasshopper and I headed out west past the Men’s Colony to do some birding-hiking-sketching at Morro Rock.

The 581 foot tall Morro Rock is a volcanic plug on California’s coast. A volcanic plug is the extinct neck of a volcano. It is a prominent landform that is a beacon for wildlife. The extinct volcano formed about 23 million years ago.

We birded around the rock. Avian highlights included white-throated swift, Bewick’s wren with common loons on Morro Bay and willets, black oystercatchers, and brown pelicans on the breakwater.

Around the base of the rock were “No Climbing” signs because Morro Rock is a peregrine falcon reserve. On our visit there were no signs of peregrine falcons.

Sketching Morro Rock with Grasshopper.

We left the trailhead and found a sketching perspective with Morro Bay in the foreground and found a sketching boulder to sketch from (featured sketch).

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The Madonna Inn

A friend’s 50th Shindig in San Luis Obispo provided me the opportunity to stay at the historic Madonna Inn for the first time.

The roadside hotel was opened in 1958 and has grown to the sprawling compound that it is today featuring five buildings on its 1,500 acre site.

The Madonna Inn sign calling visitors in from Highway 101. San Luis Obispo lies between San Francisco and Los Angeles.

The hotel is known for its oddball decor, its hot pink accents, western murals, and 110 themed rooms.

I was staying in room 205, the Buffalo Room. The room has western/Native American themed accents, a rustic wooden four poster bed, and a huge American bison head hanging on the wall. This was sketcher’s paradise.

I just hoped the bison head didn’t give me nightmares!

A bed sketch from room 205.
Buffalo head detail. It seems to be looking at you no matter where you stand in the room.
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Sonoma Coastal Sketching

One a recent weekend trip with the lads on the Sonoma Coast I added some coastal impressions to my sketchbooks.

I have sketched the coastal locations of Bodega Bay and Sea Ranch many times.

On the drive up I stopped at the Tides Restaurant in Bodega Bay for lunch (made famous in Hitchcock’s The Birds). I had a table with a view of the bay and the Bodega Head across the waters.

After lunch I walked along the wharf where I saw a group of sea lions resting on a dock. They didn’t seem to be going anywhere anytime soon so I sketched one of them (featured sketch).

The sea lion on the left is begging to be sketched!

After my sketch I drove north on Highway One towards our cabin in the woods just north of the Sonoma/ Mendocino border.

From our base camp in Gualala we headed south back into Sonoma County to visit Sea Ranch.

A Sea Ranch espresso sketch.

While I was at Sea Ranch Lodge, I did a sketch of the lodge buildings. I had stayed here once before.

One of my Sonoma County sketching touchstones is the seaslug-like Sea Ranch Chapel. I have sketched this whimsical building every time I am in the area. Every angle yields a new sketch. This time I sketched the chapel from the side, slightly to the rear. I never seem to tire of sketching this unique structure.

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The Lincoln Tomb

I visited the second most visited cemetery in the United States, the most visited is Arlington National Cemetery.

This is Oak Ridge Cemetery in Springfield, Illinois. The main draw of this cemetery is the tomb of our 16th President, Abraham Lincoln.

After Lincoln returned to Springfield on the funeral train he was placed in the Old State Capital for public viewing and then moved to Oak Ridge Cemetery where he was placed in a temporary vault.

The temporary vault at Oak Ridge.

The current memorial was dedicated October 15, 1874 and the 117 foot granite obelisk is the Memorial’s focal point.

In front of the vault is a bronze recasting of Gutzon Borglum’s head of Lincoln. Borglum is the sculptor behind the design of Mt. Rushmore. Lincoln’s nose is a shiny gold from the thousands and thousands of visitors who rub the nose for good luck.

I wouldn’t mind some good luck!

Inside the tomb is where Lincoln, his wife Mary Todd, and three of his four boys: Edward “Eddie”, William “Willie”, and Thomas “Tad” are interred. His oldest son, Robert, is buried at Arlington.

In the vault is the red marble monument to Abraham Lincoln. On the wall above is the quote that Lincoln’s Secretary of War Edwin Stanton uttered at the President’s passing, “Now he belongs to the ages”