A trip to Ca'Toga

This is from a few days ago, but it was so interesting, I thought I'd include it.

I recently joined the Creative Arts League, which is a group originally formed to promote women artits and also to help the Crocker Art Museum. I was previously aware of them because I'd been to see their juried art shows which used to be at the Crocker.

It turns out that they do two or three excursions a year, and I joined just in time to go to Ca'Toga. Ca'Toga is in Calistoga which is about 60 miles from here, and this place has been there for a number of years, but I'd never heard of it.

It's a "Palladian villa" in quotes, because in large part, it only looks like that from the front.
It's the residence of artist Carlo Marchiori, and inside the rooms are decorated in trompe l'oeil frescoes. He has done many of the frescos on canvas, though it's very hard to see that they aren't painted on the walls. But also, most of the detail work in the house, like the cool old doors, turn out to be hollow doors from Home Depot painted to look like they are old and made out of three pieces (or more) of wood which is aging beautifully. On the grounds, he has a combination of old ruins and things he made to look old. Looking around, we saw not only these pretty nifty ruins and various sculptures, but also stacks of future "ruins" which are various torn up sidewalks. Sorry the pictures are kind of willy nilly.


You can check out the website at http://www.catoga.com/

Metal Art Class

My good art friend Verna turned me on to this class today. It's a class in metal crafting. I've been looking forward to it for several weeks, because after I first signed up, the instructor, Karen Brooks, had a family emergency and had to cancel it. She rescheduled it for today, but only three students were able to come. This meant we all got a lot of attention. Besides Verna, the other student was Don, who does some other kind of art work which I haven't looked up yet. But I got up late this morning, and while I had planned to walk three miles on the way to the class, I fooled around and didn't leave home until 8:45. We were supposed to be there before the 9:30 start time, but I met my chatty neighbor Bill on the way, so I was a bit late. The class was in the brickhouse which is an art gallery and studios in Oak Park.
Karen set us up with sandpaper and steel wool and we took our pieces ofmetal out into the courtyard to sand and smoothe them. We worked for about two hours, preparing our metal pieces and then coating them with various liquids, like copper, patina, rust-producer, gesso, and alcohol inks. We got kind of bogged down when some of the products didn't quite perform as they should have -- noticeably the rust didn't rust enough.

Our day actually included a wonderful lunch made by Karen and served al fresco. We had veggie enchiladas, jicama salad and chips, a beer drink called sangria that was really good and margarita pie. And I think I'm sticking to my diet if I just don't have chocolate. Ha.
After we had our wonderful lunch, we went back into the studio and learned how to emboss, affix various things to metal, and apply leafing and similar things. In other words, I had a good time and learned a few new things.

Now that we've cleaned everything up, I thought I'd take a picture of the whole group in the working area. Can't believe I didn't remember to do this before. I'm not sure I'll do much more with this, though I did like the techniques, but it involves buying a lot of products I don't currently have, so while I would definitely take another class, I think maybe it would be nice if there were just some follow-up workshops where we could use her studio and pay for the use of supplies, etc.



I have gotten up early every day this week, and it's catching up with me. It's only 1:30 a.m. and I'm falling asleep sitting here, and don't feel like proofreading, so I'm going to bed.

The Poverty Ridge Hawk Stalkers

Here's the big excitement in the neighborhood. We have a hawk living at 23rd and T. He's way up in a redwood tree where he lives with his wife and apparently children.




These are a couple of really bad pictures of the hawk eating. I'm just using my little Canon point and shoot, and the hawk is really high up in the tree. Right after he caught this one, the other hawk, the one we think is the mother, also caught something. They're pretty noisy about it. Today Tim and Lynda said they could see babies in the nest.






The last picture here is the remainder of dinner after the hawk ate. Sort of a messy eater.

It's really cool to have this bird of prey in the neighborhood. We've been stalking the birds every day for about 5 days now. I just wish they'd get lower in the trees so I could get a better picture.

A really nice garden

Nothing going on around here. Just plugging along doing the same old stuff. It's June 5 and the weather still stinks. I'm currently sitting here wearing 2 wool sweaters. We have even had the heater on for the last two days. However, on my walk one day, I found the most beautiful garden, and I wanted to post some pix. This apartment building is a pretty crummy place and has always looked rather derelict, but someone who lives there obviously likes to garden -- obviously, because no gardener that a landlord hires is going to keep a garden like this going. If the weather weren't so crappy, this garden would probably be cooked by now, with hundred degree temperatures, instead of 66. I think I've gotten a message that says I've used up all my megabytes for this, but I'm going to try to upload a couple of videos too.