California

Neighborhoods: Lincoln Park and the Legion of Honor

In the northwestern corner of the San Francisco is a patch of green and an art museum.

The museum is the Legion of Honor and I headed over on a rainy Friday to see the current exhibit: Manet & Morisot. I also love to look at the museum’s permanent collection.

The museum is a 15 minute drive from my Sunset Digs and being a member means I can visit the museum as many times as I want.

One of two lions framing (or guarding) the entrance to the Legion. I sketched the other lion.

Looking at the masters: Rodin, Van Gough, Picasso, Monet, and others always inspires me to sketch. What I love about looking at the real deal as opposed to a facsimile is that you can really see the hand of the creator on the canvas or board. This was very true of the expressionists as they lay paint on in heavy patches. Step a few feet back to see what emerges!

Field sketching with Sutro Tower in the background. This tower has a way of appearing in many of my San Francisco field sketches.

Vertigo and Gallery 6 (1958)

The Legion of Honor was used as a filming location in Hitchcock’s masterpiece, Vertigo (1958).

It was featured twice, both the exterior and one of the museum’s galleries, Gallery 6.

Detective Scottie Ferguson (James Stewart) is on a case and he follows Madeleine (Kim Novak) to the Legion of Honor. She sits for hours looking at a portrait of a lady. Scottie finds out it is a portrait of a lady named Carlotta.

Looking into Gallery 6. James Stewart stood next to the column on the right and in the background Kim Novak sat on a bench toward the left wall.

While Gallery 6 still looks much the same as when filming took place here in 1957, the paintings on the wall were not here. The Carlotta portrait was painted for the film by John Ferren and removed once filming was completed. But what about the other paintings?

This view shows the wall in Gallery 6 where the portrait of Carlotta hung. Kim Novak sat on one of the benches that have not changed since 1957 although the paintings in the gallery have changed.

Now it was time for a painting goose chase and I didn’t have far to go.

In adjacent Gallery 7 I located two paintings that James Stewart stood in front of during the Gallery 6 scenes. Two pieces of San Franciscan cinema history!

This is French painter
Nicolas de Largillière’s Portrait of a Gentleman (1710).
The other painting seen behind James Stewart is by French painter Carle Vanloo and is titled Architecture (1753).

For my sketch of Galley 6 I sketched in a continuous-line technique to get the shape of the room and then lifted my pen to add details. So it’s continuous-ish.

Aerospace Museum of California

My Saturday morning sketching destination was a museum next to a former Air Force base: McClellan AFB in North Highlands Sacramento.

The museum is housed in a hangar with a solid collection of airplanes outside. To sketch the aircraft in the museum’s collection I’d have to head outside and brave the cool temps.

Planes, planes everywhere! The museum has a collection of both prop and jet planes spanning a wide range of aviation history.

I arrived just after the museum opened at 9. It was a cold morning under clear blue skies in the Central Valley.

Looking at the business end of an A-10 Warthog: a 30 mm Gau-8 Avenger was designed to destroy tanks.

I did a total of three sketches including a broken continuous- line sketch (featured sketch).

For two of my sketches I sketched from an unconventional perspective from behind the featured aircraft: A-10 and the F-4.

The McDonnell-Douglas F-4 Phantom II is my favorite aircraft. Each time I sketch one I think I get to know it a little better.

Another sketch was of an F-86 Sabre in the hangar. This was for a previously posted post about the Farrell’s disaster.

A sketch from my sketcher’s bench. The A-10 is an absolute beast.

Mendocino Headlands State Park

Sketching the Mendocino Headlands calls for my panoramic journal to capture the wide views. So I did.

In the early morning I headed out to the Headlands and sketched a rock form with two arched tunnels. I think I’ve sketched this rock before but from a different angle.

The rocks within the bays have become islands that offers a protected roosting spots for birds such as western gulls, black oystercatchers, brown pelicans, Canada goose, and turkey vultures.

I sketched three vultures, affectionately known as TVs, warming up on such an island.

One of my favorite sketches at Mendocino Headlands State Park was from the beach where the Big River enters the Pacific just south of the historic town of Mendocino.

The beach was covered with driftwood and I found a large former tree to sit on and I started to sketch the scene before me (featured sketch).

A sketchers in Paradise!

Watertower Controversy

The residents of Mendocino are concerned with preserving the heritage of the town and keeping Mendocino, well, Mendocino.

This means keeping buildings as they are, restricting construction in historical areas, and preserving the town’s watertowers.

There is one watertower on Main Street that has been slated to be torn down so I thought I better sketch it while I can.

The 1904 watertower has been deemed unsafe and it is not cost effective to repair the tower so once again the battle between heritage/history and money rears its ugly head.

I saw lots of “Save the Watertower” flyers in shopfront windows. Time will tell if Mendocino can save this historic structure.

The Skunk Train: Steam Deferred

It can be a hard time for tourist railroads with the rising operational costs such as maintaining the locomotives, rolling stock, tracks, bridges, and tunnels.

The California Western Railroad aka the Skunk Train went from Fort Bragg on the coast, 40 miles east to Willits. That is until tunnel Number One collapsed in 2013, cutting the line in two disconnected segments.

The line currently runs trains out of both ends. The Fort Bragg side runs for about three miles and stops at the entrance to the tunnel (which will take about $300,000 to reopen.)

I rode the Skunk from Fort Bragg a while back and it seems just as the train gets going it stops, halted by the collapsed tunnel. Not much of a ride with the many bridges and redwood scenery on the other side of the tunnel.

The skunk train is now under diesel-electric motive power. The afternoon Skunk pulls into the Fort Bragg Depot. EMD GP9 No. 66 is on point. On the left is the M-300 motor car.

The real star of the railroad is the Mikado (2-8-2) Number 45. The steam locomotive was built by Baldwin Locomotive Works in 1924.

The 101 year old locomotive is now undergoing a rebuilt in the engine house. It will likely be a year and a half before the sounds of 45’s whistle echos along the coastline. Hopefully the line will then be opened to Willits.

The three bay engine house. In the right bay sits No. 45.

The side door to the engine house was open allowing me to get a sketch in of CWR No. 45. In her current state she seems a long way off from riding the high iron.

A rainy morning car sketch of the Skunk Train Depot in Fort Bragg.

Sketching the Mendo Coast

I found plenty of sketching subjects on a Monday morning drive north from my Caspar digs on the Mendocino Coast: two whales and a rock shaped like an elephant.

My first “whale” was to be found in Westport (population 299) about 15 miles north of Fort Bragg on Highway One.

If you build a whale, they will come. At least that’s what I think the sculpture/creator thought and I did come to sketch it. At onetime you could enter the belly of the whale and recline and watch television. Now it seemed closed to the public with a sign on the white picket fence warning of the Dalmatian. I didn’t see the Dalmatian, so I guessed I would be safe.

Thar she blows!!

Some things are beyond the realm of understanding such is the gray sperm whale in the front yard in Westport. Everyone knows that gray whales are the stars of the Mendocino Coast whale migration not Moby Dick!

Roadside attraction gone bad or failed hotel room, who knows! I sketched it anyway.

I retraced by way south to Blues Beach. My next sketching subject was a large rock which, if your squinted, looked like a pachyderm, hence the name Elephant Rock.

My final whale sketch was alas, a real whale. At least a former one. This was to found at MacKerricher State Park just north of Fort Bragg.

Near the visitors center is a collection of whale bones. The 32 foot gray whale skeleton was what caught my sketcher’s eye.

I seated myself on a nearby picnic table and started to sketch the jigsaw bones of the gray whale.

The gray whale migration should begin in earnest in February as adults would be heading south to their birthing lagoons in Baja California.

McDonnell Douglas F-4C Phantom II

I returned to the Pacific Coast Air Museum in northern Santa Rosa to sketch one of my favorite airplanes: the F-4 Phantom II.

Throughout my life I have been fascinated by things with wings: birds and airplanes. Growing up in Sunnyvale, California, my bedroom window looked out towards the flight path on final approach to Moffett Field, US Navy base.

During my childhood, the most common aircraft that flew by my window was the submarine hunter P-3 Orion. The patrol aircraft were stationed at Moffett.

Every summer, we headed up to the roof during the annual air show to watch the Blue Angels. At the time they flew A-4 Skyhawks but in the year of my birth they, and the Air Force performance team the Thunderbirds, flew the McDonnell Douglas F-4 Phantom II.

This airplane is a beast. At the time it was one of the most powerful fighters in the air reaching speed just over Mach 2. It had earned the nickname the “Flying Brick”.

A docent at the museum who was stationed on an aircraft carrier said you new when you were in the mess when an F-4 took off because you coffee cup shook with power of the fighter’s thrust.

A pre-museum sketch of an aerial beast.

A childhood hobby was building scale model airplanes and my favorite was an F-4 hand painted camo livery.

Looking head on at the F-4C.

I was now going to Santa Rosa to sketch a full scale fighter with a similar camo paint scheme.

The iconic vertical and angled horizontal stabilizers of the F-4. This jet is an absolute beast.
A continuous line sketch of four planes at the museum. The plane on the left, F/A 18 Hornet is what the Blue Angels currently fly. The camouflaged F-4 is on the right.

It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad Aircraft Hangar

There is a little known piece of film history in Northern Santa Rosa at the airport, now called the Charles M. Shultz Sonoma County Airport.

While Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt (1943) gets most of the movie history headlines in Santa Rosa, an aircraft hangar was the site of a hair-raising flying stunt in the film It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963).

The Butler Hangar was built in 1943, the same year that Shadow was released. The airfield was used during World War Two as a training field. Sixty pilot lost their lives while training here.

One of my favorite fighters, the F-4 Phantom II with the Butler Hangar in the background. As a kid I built an F-4 model and painted it in a similar camo paint scheme.

After the war the airfield, including the hangar, was returned to civilian use and it has been in continuous use since World War Two.

Field sketching at the airfield at the Pacific Coast Air Museum. My sketching backrest was an auxiliary fuel tank from a F-105F Thunderchief.

The hangar was featured in a very short clip of the epic comedy, It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad, World. It is a screwball road film where a cast of crazed characters, featuring a who’s who of comedy, races across the west coast to find some stolen money ($350,000). Most race in cars while a few travel by air.

Buddy Hackett and Mickey Rooney are forced to fly the twin engine Beech 18-D because the pilot/owner Jim Backus is passed out drunk or possibly dead in the back.

What ensues is some wild flying including buzzing a control tower and flying through a billboard sign (this stunt was the film’s most dangerous and caused damage to the plane).

The pilot who performed the stunts was the one-legged Frank Tallman, a veteran and legend Hollywood stunt flyer.

The stunt was performed on December 4, 1962. Tallman made two low test passes and then lined up to the west of the hangar and speed through, pulling up to avoid hitting trees to the east. He did the stunt in one take and refused to do another pass.

Looking west through the hangar. Tallman flew the Beech 18-D from this direction. The hangars in the background were not built in 1962.

The hangar is now part of the Pacific Coast Air Museum which has an impressive collection of aircraft including the F-4 Phantom, F-16 Viper, F-14 Tomcat, F-15 Eagle, F/A-18 Hornet, A-7A Corsair, A-4 Skyhawk, and many more.

This F-8U Crusader was essentially a playground toy in a San Franciscan park, also known as “the plane in the park”. It was at Larsen Park for 20 years and I remember seeing it as my family drove north on 19th Avenue in the Sunset District. The plane was damaged from vandalism and the foggy maritime weather and was moved to Santa Rosa in 1993 and cosmetically restored.

Beech 18

Near the perimeter fence and away from the limelight of the other planes in the museum’s collection sits a silver wingless, moterless twin engine plane that has clearly seen better days.

This is a Beech 18, the same plane that flew through the Butler Hangar.

In the future, plans are to restore the plane (they have the wings somewhere) and display the Beech next to the hangar made famous in an epic comedy.

Shadow of a Doubt: Santa Rosa’s Railroad Square

Alfred Hitchcock’s own favorite film was his 1943’s Shadow of a Doubt starring Teresa Wright and Joseph Cotton.

The noir thriller was filmed in the Sonoma County city of Santa Rosa. The city was picked by Hitchcock and his team as a quaint and peaceful small city in which to inject the Merry Widow Murderer (Cotton). The script was cowritten by Our Town playwright Thornton Wilder in an attempt to capture the flavor of life in a small town.

Uncle Charlie is eventually foiled by his namesake Charlie (Wright) as she slowly realizes who he really is and meets his end on a pilot of a freight train (spoiler alert!).

Uncle Charlie first enters idyllic Santa Rosa at the stone Northwestern Pacific (NWP) Depot (1904). The depot looks very much the same as it did in 1943, as it has withstood various earthquakes that have destroyed many of it’s contemporary surrounding buildings.

As the train approaches the depot the exhaust from the locomotive is an ominous pitch black and as the train pulls past the camera, a shadow envelopes the platform. This was all planned by Hitchcock as a modern “something wicked this way comes”. The arrival of Uncle Charlie to Santa Rosa.

A pre-trip sketch of a frame from the film of Northwestern Pacific No. 142 pulling into Santa Rosa Depot.

I sketched the depot and platform from the approximate camera position when the northbound train first arrives. It was a frigid morning and my fingerless gloves came in handy.

Looking north along the platform towards the depot. This is approximately where Joseph Cotten detrains from the last passenger car.
Passenger service to Santa Rosa ceased in 1958. After 67 years, passenger service is alive and well at the Santa Rosa Depot with the SMART train providing service to Larkspur and north to Windsor.
Two SMART trains at the Santa Rosa Depot. The near train is a northbound, heading the same direction as NWR No. 142 at the beginning of the film. At one time the line went north, 230.3 miles, to Eureka, California.

Sonoma Bits & Bobs

These are a collection of sketches that are related in their location, the Sonoma Coast.

From Mammoth Rock to Fort Ross to the north and into the Russian River Valley to the former lumber town of Duncans Mills.

Fort Ross

One morning I drove half an hour north from my digs to Fort Ross State Historic Park. Fort Ross is a sketching touchstone for me and I have returned here with my sketchbook many times. This time I chose a different angle sitting on a rock outside the fort looking towards the Russian Church. I had wanted to sketch from a similar perspective on a previous visit, but I was foiled by rainy conditions.

Duncans Mills

I have wanted to sketch the train station and caboose at Duncans Mills for a while but I had not found the right perspective. There were always cars parked in front and around the station so I sat on the end of the caboose with the back of the station in the background. The narrow gauge line was to the right but is name a paved parking lot.

The narrow gauge railroad came to the lumber town of Duncans Mills in the 1870s and rail, both passenger and freight, until train service was discontinued in 1935.

North Pacific Coast Railroad Caboose No. 2. This narrow gauge caboose was built in 1877.

Sonoma Coast SP: Mammoth Rock

From my digs it was a short drive north to Goat Rock State Beach- Sonoma Coast State Park. My hiking/ sketching destination was Mammoth Rock. It was a blustery 30 minute hike to the large Mammoth Rock.

Wintery and windy weather is never an impediment to a good sketching experience. Driving, windy rain is another monster.

I found a perspective and started my sketch.

Sketching Bodega to Bodega Bay and The Birds

I wanted to sketch the actual bay of Bodega Bay but I wanted to find the right perspective (is there really such a thing).

I settled on a pullout near Spud Point Marina looking north.

It was near this location where Rose Gaffney’s house was located. Gaffney was a local rancher who led the protest against PG & E when they wanted to build a nuclear power plant at nearby Bodega Head.

Alfred Hitchcock wanted to use this location as “Mitch’s House” in his new film “The Birds” (1963). Gaffney was not a movie goer and had no idea who Hitchcock was.

The crew built a set with other outbuildings around Gaffney’s house. The house burned down in the late 1960s and the area today bears little resemblance to when the film was filmed here in the early 60s.

One filming location that has not changed since 1963 is the Potter Schoolhouse in Bodega (not to be confused with Bodega Bay, which is eight miles away).

This was the location used for the school during the corvid attack in The Birds.

The schoolhouse was built in 1873 out of local redwood. At the time of filming the building was no longer used as a school and the structure was derelict. Since filming took place the school was used as a bed and breakfast but now it is a private residence.

I pulled up on the street that the children ran down as they were attacked by a murder of crows. In the film they are running towards the Tides Restaurant in Bodega Bay. With a little movie magic, camera angles, and matte paintings it appears that the schoolhouse and the Tides are in the same location. In reality, eight miles separate the two locations.

While the school looks much the same, redwoods have now grown up around the schoolhouse and I included them in my sketch.