I have enjoyed sketching in the town of Fort Bragg, just to the north of Mendocino.
The genesis of Fort Bragg as a town was the huge strands of coast redwoods and lumber mills sprang up to harvest the timber.
Now how to get the lumber to markets like San Francisco to help build the growing city?
Lumber was shipped south by boat but once the California Pacific connected Ft. Bragg with Willitis and the Northwestern Pacific, milled lumber could be shipped by rail.
The rails of the past lives on as the Skunk Train. Now a tourist railroad.
I did some sketching at the train yard (featured sketch) including the water tower with the skunk logo.
The past and present of Skunk Train. A diesel pulling into the station with a water tower of the steam age in the background.
My Christmas morning tradition does not entail waking early and opening gifts under the lighted Christmas tree but waking early and heading west to find some feather gifts at Gray Lodge Wildlife Area.
The main draw of driving the auto route is the thousands of wintering waterfowl that can be seen from my movable birding blind.
There is nothing like the sight and sound of thousands of snow geese bursting into flight!
There also a lot of wintering raptors at Gray Lodge. On my visit I saw red-tailed, red-shouldered, sharp-shinned, and Cooper’s hawks, peregrine falcon, American kestrel, and bald eagle.
While not considered a raptor, there are plenty of turkey vultures about, including this one sunning itself.
During my morning visit I notched up 63 species of birds including some species that I don’t regularly encounter at Gray Lodge including the secretive sora and American bittern (below).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
Corvid Sketcher 