Month: December 2024

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Embarcadero Sketching

On a Thursday morning I was on the hunt for two sculptures near the Ferry Building at the base of Market Street.

It wasn’t going to be a tough hunt because sculptures don’t move.

About a week earlier I had done some sketching at the de Young Museum. I had sketched two pieces in the Sculpture Garden by Henry Moore and Clars Oldenburg.

There were other pieces by these artists in San Francisco. One, Cupid’s Span (Oldenburg), near the Bay Bridge and the other Standing Figure Knife Edged (Moore) at Maritime Plaza. Both were within easy walking distance.

Oldenburg’s bow with the Ferry Building in the background.

I took the N Judah towards the Caltrain station and 50 minutes later Cupid’s Span appeared to the left. This was really Muni front door service to this large piece of outdoor public art.

Riding Muni after experiencing the spectacular trams of Oslo over the summer made the City by the Bay’s transit system seem amateurish and unreliable. We could certainly learn something from Europe’s exemplary transit. If you want to be late for work, take Muni!

I sat in the little park before Cupid’s Span. I liked sketching the curves of the bow and the feathers of the arrow. I have always wondered at the meaning of an arrow pulled taunt against a bowstring aimed into the earth. Still wondering what, if anything, it means.

After sketching I headed along the Embarcadero past the Ferry Building. My destination was Maritime Center near the Embarcadero Center (featured in Coppola’s The Conversation).

I was searching for the Yorkshire sculptor Henry Moore’s piece Standing Figure Knife Edged. This was a bit of public art that took a bit more searching than Oldenburg’s oversized bow and arrow.

Adding another Henry Moore sculpture to my sketchbook.

After sketching Moore’s piece I wandered to the other side of the plaza and found another whimsical sculpture, Bronze Horse by Italian sculptor Marino Marini. The sculpture looks like a giant anteater crossed with a horse.

The sketch of an anteater-horse.
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Bay Area Public Art Part 2

I headed to San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park to sketch’s some sculptures on a Sunday afternoon.

My first destination was the sculpture garden at the de Young Museum. I was going to do a twofer sketch from my sketching bench perspective.

The two pieces that I added to my sketchbook were the 21 foot tall Corridor Pin, Blue (1999) by Claes Oldenburg and in the foreground, Henry Moore’s Working Model for Sheep Piece (1971).

My next piece of public art was to found along The Golden Mile Project along the JFK Promenade just to the north of the de Young Museum.

This roadway in the park has been closed to auto traffic and the road surface is painted with 12 murals produce by a group called Paint the Void.

Near the Rose Garden a life sized wooden humpback whale tail breached the roadway. This piece is called Street Whale. I perched on a bike rack and sketched the piece on the left side of my spread.

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The Fog

Ever since my babysitter let me stay up and watch Halloween on television (mom sure knew how to pick a babysitter), I have loved the films of John Carpenter.

One of Carpenter’s lesser known films was filmed on location in the Northern Bay Area. This is The Fog (1980).

This paranormal ghost thriller was filmed in Marin and Sonoma Counties, north of San Francisco. I wanted to revisit some these beautiful locations and do some Saturday morning sketching so I headed north over the Golden Gate Bridge.

The fictional town of Antonio Bay were really the west Marin towns of Stinson Beach, Olema, Pt. Reyes Station, and Inverness.

My first stop was Stinson Beach, or more accurately just southeast of Stinson Beach on Highway One.

About 50 minutes from leaving my Sunset digs, I was sitting in my sketching chair sketching the town of Stinson Beach.

The scene before me that I was adding to my panoramic sketchbook was the same view used for the title sequence for The Fog.

After finishing my sketch (featured sketch), I drove north on Highway One through Stinson and then skirted the shoreline of Bolinas Lagoon on my way to Olema.

Scenes were filmed in this area at the junction of Highway One and Sir Francis Drake Boulevard. The location featured two generations of scream queens who happen to be mother and daughter: Janet Leigh (Psycho) and Jamie Lee Curtis (Halloween). Neither did much screaming in The Fog.

Olema parking lot. The parking lot and the bar in the blue building to the right were used as filming locations in The Fog.

I continued on to Pt. Reyes Station where the “downtown” of Antonio Bay was filmed. The Fog demonstrates the patchwork nature of how location filming is used to create one whole location is is not usually geographically accurate.

Downtown Pt. Reyes Station.
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Free Bay Area Public Art

After visiting Oslo’s Vigeland Park this summer, Europe’s largest sculpture park devoted to a single artist, I wanted to sketch some of the free public sculptures within my home turf.

One of perhaps the most famous and well recognized sculptures in the world is to be found in San Francisco’s Legion of Honor in Lincoln Park. This in Rodin’s The Thinker.

I didn’t want to sketch the statue from the front of even the side but from behind, including the many admirers that come to photograph the masterpiece, often mimicking the famous pose.

The sculpture is in the courtyard of the museum with no admission necessary to take a selfie. So this sculpture meets my criteria of free public art.

While The Thinker is close to my home I wanted to find some public art close to my work in San Mateo.

It turns out that one stop down Highway 92 there is a piece in a business park titled “Untitled”(2016) by T. Olle Lundberg.

This piece of Corten steel and concrete has been given the name “Falling Slabs” because this is exactly what it looks like. Heavy steel plates falling like dominos.