sculpture

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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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Column Snake, Stanford

On a Saturday morning Grasshopper and I headed to Stanford to do some field sketching and we found ourselves in front of the university’s latest public art.

This piece is an extended Corinthian column rearing up to look like a cobra about to strike. It bears the all too prosaic title of “Hello”. It was completed in 2021 by Xu Zhen.

I would think a better title for the sculpture would be “Column-Snake of Death” or “Columnar Churro of Doom” or even “Goodbye!”.

The column snake seems to tower over Hoover Tower.
Grasshopper Sparrow sketching Hello.
Another perspective and another sketch.
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Goldsworthy, Rivers and Tides

“We often forget that WE ARE NATURE. Nature is not something separate from us. So when we say that we have lost our connection to nature, we’ve lost our connection to ourselves.” ~Andy Goldsworthy

During shelter-in-place I made some time in the evenings to rewatch some of my favorite movies.

These consisted of independent films, foreign language films, and documentaries. Here is a short list of some of the films I have watched recently: Amelie, Being There, Butterfly (La lengua de las mariposas), Chariots of Fire, Cria Cuevis, Delicatessen, The Fog of War, The Lives of Others, Odd Man Out, Once Upon a Time in the West, The Third Man, Spirited Away, Sunset Boulevard, and Rivers and Tides.

The last is one of the best documentaries I have ever seen about the artistic process (and a profile of an amazing artist.) This 2001 documentary was filmed, edited and directed by Thomas Riedelsheimer and it’s full title is Rivers and Tides: Andy Goldsworthy Working With Time.

The English sculptor, Andy Goldsworthy, is an artist I am familiar with because I have sketched many of his pieces in the Bay Area. His medium is nature and his sculptures are often ephemeral, being destroyed (he would say altered) by the wind, rain, and the rising tide.

A sketch of Goldsworthy’s Wood Line in the Presidio from 2015.

Rewatching Rivers and Tides, made me want to go out into the San Lorenzo watershed and make a sculpture out of nature. To do that, I needed river rocks and there was no better beach for this than Rocky Beach.

Rock cairns at Rocky Beach, telling the river which way to flow.

I headed upstream from the beach to Upper Rocky Beach, to gather stones. I tried to “shake hands” with the place and the stone and I worked on making a stone cairn, a pale imitation of Goldsworthy’s work.

Once I finished my Apprentice-piece, I sat down and sketched the work, much like Goldsworthy does. I do love sketching rocks, attempting to get the lines, contours, and textures onto paper.

A 2015 sketch of another Goldsworthy sculpture on the campus of Stanford. Stone River (2001). This riverine design influenced the lines work under the title of the featured sketch. A very Goldsworthian motif.