AURORA

Yosemite Rennaissance XXIII

I failed to write about this a month ago, but I had a piece recently accepted into the prestigious Yosemite Renaissance XXIII  art exhibition, held annually for the last 23 years in Yosemite National Park, exhibited in the Yosemite Museum.

The exhibition is annual and "is intended to encourage diverse artistic interpretations of Yosemite and the surrounding Sierra region. Its goals are to bring together the works of serious contemporary artists that do not simply duplicate traditional representations; to establish a continuum with past generations of Yosemite artists; and to help re-establish visual art as a major interpretive medium of the landscape and a stimulus to the protection of the environment.  Historically, the arts have played a very important role in the establishment of our State and National Parks.  It is our hope that they can be just as important in future efforts to preserve and protect that heritage."

The awards reception was held over the last weekend in February, and I loved it.  I met some great artists, one of whom I had admired for many years, Mr. Ted Orland.  Ted, a photographer and teacher, co-wrote an amazing book with photographer David Bayles called Art and Fear . It was one of those books that I would buy and give out as gifts to other artists I knew...it is THAT good!  We had a nice chat and he promised me he'd send me his newest book The View from the Studio Door.  Good to his word, it showed up two weeks later.  A lovely and generous gift.  Anyway, although I didn't win a prize for my piece, a abstract photograph of glacial stones sitting near Lake Tenaya's mirrored surface,  I had a great time, saw some wonderful art and was pleased just to be included.  We spent the next three days hiking and photographing many of the waterfalls and rivers in full Spring melt, the snowy trees and stones and the winding trails. Yosemite is one of the most beautiful places left in the world.

I came back with many great photos that I may try and enter next year!

The exhibit will run from March to May 4th in Yosemite, then travel northern California; to Mariposa (June-July) Hanford (Aug-Sept.) Redwood city (October-November) and Turlock (Nov.-Dec.)

Check out the website for more info...

Glass at Saint Patrick's Catholic Church, S.F

Its been a while since I was able to get to write on this blog thing I started.  I haven't had the opportunity in the past few months to get out and view some great glass I haven't already seen. But recently I did decide to go to a church that I had long admired but not photographed in before, St. Patrick's Catholic Church. There is not much history I could find on this church, although I haven't dug too deep. There was no pastor or historian around when I visited with my camera.

St. Patrick's is a stately red brick Gothic Revival piece of architecture, and when it was built back in the late 1800's it sat alone among smaller buildings.  It was one of the tallest buildings around. It has since been dwarfed by the massive corporate skyscrapers that dominate the skyline around it. 

Of particular interest at this point in San Francisco history is the near-completion of the San Francisco Contemporary Jewish Museum, located right behind St. Patrick's in downtown San Francisco's Yerba Buena cultural district on Mission Street between 3rd & 4th streets.  The museum boasts an adaptive reuse of the classical skin of the landmark 1907 Jessie Street Power Substation with an extension clad in vibrant blue steel panels.  The  Daniel Libeskind designed, 63,000-square-foot building preserves the character-defining features of the substation and introduces bold contemporary spaces. His idea of the new addition is "based on the physical form of the Hebrew word and symbol for life, the chai. Emerging from behind the walls and roof of the former substation, the new chai addition transforms the industrial spaces of the early twentieth-century edifice into a new forum for the exchange of historical and contemporary ideas".

So, with also the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art,  Zeum, Yerba Buena  Cultural Center, Crown Point Press, the Museum of the African Diaspora, and the Museum of Craft and Folk Art, surrounding it, the three block radius around St. Patrick's is an active Art Institution district.

Perhaps because there is no real residences around, the church serves mainly an itinerant community, although there was a sizable group of Filipino nuns there when I visited.
With so many tourists zooming in and around such institutions, it is actually a shame that more folks don't go in and sit in this church.  Not only does it provide a moments quiet and peace from the frantic pace of traffic outside, but if they sat for a minute they might partake of some of San Francisco's most splendid examples of painted glass in architecture. 

The glazing scheme consists of four major groups.  Along the side walls of the nave are sets of double lancets, each depicting a Doctor of the Church, or a significant Saint, typically robed and holding a book, crozier or some prop, and surrounded by a Gothic architectural canopy. The five single lancets over the altar depict the four Gospel writers with their books and quill pens, in rich colors and jewel like glass, a ornate halo over each.  The center lancet depicts Saint Patrick. the rear windows depict three scenes, two from the life of Saint Patrick and the major window over the ornate balcony, partially hidden by the pipe organ depicts an ancient warrior on horseback leading an army into battle and lifting an ornate cross. 

The Clerestory windows are perhaps my favorite, and although high up and difficult to see the narrative, the glass quality and choice is superb. The modulation of the painting and organization of masses of colors make these windows sing high above. The Lancet windows below them are detailed and highly painted, but are painted on a slightly pale golden glass, giving these windows a dull look.  In contrast, the colors high in the clerestory windows are beautifully arranged, and seem almost liquid as light dissolves through them.  It took my zoom lens and a computer screen for me to actually see and study the intricate painting and narrative in full. The windows seem to depict moments in the story of great Irish Saints and mythic Heroes, with long Gaelic names I can't pronounce.

However, the subject is a pleasant extra, for the real power of these high windows are the colors. They appear as abstract paintings from below, bright undulating pools of color and sparkle.

I have included shots of all the clerestory windows, all the rear windows and altar windows, and the better examples of the lancets. Clearly some of these lancet windows were re-created after a fire, and a few incorporate some of the old, surviving fire grazed glass in their compositions.  These windows have a slightly later and heavier quality to the painting than most of the others.

Aside from this the glass is fine examples of good church art and some of the finest glass painting of the day. Certainly some of the finest to be found in San Francisco.  It was one of the last major places I have taken my tripod and camera in this city, although I hope to find more.   Please enjoy these works in the 'stained Glass in San Francisco " photo album...

*On a technical note: One might look at some of the clerestory window photos below and in the album and think "why do they look like they were shot straight on, when he said they were high up? was he on a scaffold?"  That's a good question, and no, I wasn't on a scaffold.  The shots of the colored clerestory windows were digitally manipulated by me in the program Adobe Photoshop.  Each window as its normally viewed and photographed will be 'keystoned' with the bottom wider than the top.  But all the visual information needed is there and visible, it just looks a bit distorted.  I then used the 'transform/distort' feature of  the program to 'undistort' the image and flatten it out, to great effect by the way.  There is still loss in the detail of the window, unfortunately, owing to the 'halating' quality of light passing into a darkened interior, the distance at which I shot, and the humble power of my non-professional lens.***

 

(Check out this beard!!!) The clerestory windows below...

Particle Accelerator Mandala

Dawn of the Large Hadron Collider Credit & Copyright: Maximilien Brice, CERN

One of my favorite websites is NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day Archive.

On this day they presented the above picture of a new state of the art particle accelerator.

Formally, this image, it reminds me of a Rose Window or a eastern Buddhist Mandala. Can you see this? Perhaps science and the mystical are starting to merge in ways that we dont yet fully understand. I think it will be a quantum leap in Man's evolution as a being when these disciplines begin to complement each other rather than oppose, for both seek only to find, explore, and contexualize man's place in the universe.

here is the description...

"Explanation: Why do objects have mass? To help find out, Europe's CERN has built the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the most powerful particle accelerator yet created by humans. This May, the LHC is scheduled to start smashing protons into each other with unprecedented impact speeds. The LHC will explore the leading explanation that mass arises from ordinary particles slogging through an otherwise invisible but pervasive field of virtual Higgs particles. Were high energy colliding particles to create real Higgs bosons, the Higgs mechanism for mass creation may be bolstered. LHC will also look for micro black holes, magnetic monopoles, and explore the possibility that every type of fundamental particle we know about has a nearly invisible supersymmetric counterpart. The LHC@Home project will allow anyone with a home computer to help LHC scientists search archived LHC data for these strange beasts. Pictured above, a person stands in front of the huge ATLAS detector, one of six detectors being attached to the LHC."

Susan Hertel's glass mural in the WaMu

So I know its been a while since I posted anything, but I think I may be running out of stained glass to shoot in this Bay Area...

But I did finally have some time to make it into the Washington Mutual Bank building on Lombard/Van Ness street to have a glimpse of the large mural inside. I asked the manager if i could take some photos, and somehow I managed to impress upon her that I wasnt trying to 'case' the joint. haha.

Due to the weather, on overcast day, I thought it would be a great time to shoot it. However, the work has several major design flaws which make a proper viewing difficult. The first is that behind the mural, large dark trees have grown up, and these cast a shadow on the glass. So there are parts that are illuminated, and some that are in shadow. Second is the fact that that there appears to be an outer overhang to the roof, and this casts a dark shadow on the top four feet of the composition. Thirdly, while dark on the inside of the building, there are two enormous chandelier type light fixtures, and many smaller drop cannister type lights. these are hard to see byond, and interfere with any strightforward look. So looking must be done at angles and upward, which is why the photos tend to be a bit sharp in their angles, as you can see.

But I think its a good solid work of glass, perhaps not so innovative, but colorful and the modeling of the figures is interesting and fluid. The whole composition reads like a children's book, with mothers holding babies, and children dancing and playing with animals and musical instruments.

The work was done by the artist/painter/muralist Susan Hertel, who was originally trained as a mural painter, and later designed stained glass. A graduate of Scripps College in 1952, Susan Hertel raised her large family on ranches in both Glendora, California, and Cerrillos, New Mexico. Her subject matter in her paintings depicts the pleasure she took in life on the ranches with the many animals and human activities. A retrospective of her work was held at Scripps College in the Fall, 1998.

Here is some more background info on her. she was a painter, who seems to have made a living with murals, mainly for buildings owned by Home Savings Bank, of which the WaMu bank building is originally one. Another important commission was in Hollywood, CA. She died in 1993, but was a successful mother and painter, and seems to have drawn her subject matter from her own life on a ranch with animals.

Update: The Cathedral of Light, Oakland, CA

Well, work is progressing on the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Oakland's new Cathedral of Light. I recently visited it to see for myself. The glass shell appears finished, and the interior is being worked on now. There is a wooden interior structure that appears to have venting to allow tghe flow of air and light. this appears to be in progress, as there is a large scaffold in place throughout much of its soaring interior.

The glass exterior fabric, a sort of curved curtain wall is made of very large sheets, held in place by a metal support structure. The glass also appears to be etched or sandblasted to a an even degree with some sort of hard edged linear abstract design, reminiscent of old computer punchcards with some sort of elongated modernist geometric design. I had to use a zoom to take the pics below, as access is restricted by security fencing for non-workers.

It is shaping up to be a beautiful abstract building... The fact that the floorplan is based on the Vesica Pisces, the fish design made by the meeting of two circles and frequently used as a symbol of Christ, "the fisher of men' makes the building liturgically relevent. This seems to be a quantum leap from architects of the last generation who designed large sacred space more in the line of modernist sculpture than something connected to the actual ritual of the spiritual group using the space. Just witness the imposing, dystopic Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels, in Los Angeles for example. Although this building is quite sculptural, I do have the feeling that if it were not for its elegant curving shape, it would be mistaken for a corporate style office, at least from the outside.

I dont predict any real historic type of artglass being installed here, as it might detract from the architects vision and its heavy use of frosted plate glass, but anything's posssible. I shall report back on this building as it nears completion sometime in 2008.