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Spring Blooms

There is something magical about the Sonoran Desert. Despite the scrubby bushes and monotonous sand, there is a quality to the people, the land, and the architecture that I have always loved. (This nostalgia for my childhood is not to be confused with actually wanting to live there!)

Local artist Ted DeGrazia’s Gallery in the Sun retains the character that subdivisions and strip malls have swallowed up in Tucson. I love these colored flowers that can be found all over the compound. An artist on site told me they are made by cutting apart and painting old soda cans.

Repurposing existing materials into drought-proof, all-season flowers strikes me as quintessentially Tucsonan. (Fun fact: Freecycle, an incredible re-use community, was founded in Tucson.)

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Open Me

Zuni Door HandleMy vacation photos suffer from my obsession with details, especially doors and windows. This wouldn’t be a problem except I forget to get the long shots as well, so I end up with a lot of frames but no story.

This door handle, reminiscent of a Zuni clown with his weird striped sock feet on his head, is on the front door of a Native American gallery/shop in St. Philip’s Plaza in Tucson.

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Eye Shadow

I wish I could take credit for it, but it was my brother who saw the eye created from the shadow of a nearby street lamp. The position is so perfect it looks intentional. I wonder if the artist has seen it like this.

From the City of Denver web site:

“In addition to the Zen garden, MacIntosh Park contains a large granite sculpture of a Janus Head; the two heads face west and east, reminding us that we must look to the past as well as the future. Suspended between the two heads is a plumb-bob, a tool used by builders to establish a true vertical, representing this location as the beginning of “where a city is built.” The plumb bob points down onto the granite paving, which positions Denver in the larger world. Denver’s geographic position is represented by two wide, bi-axial granite bands suggesting longitude and latitude, crossing beneath the head sculpture. References to our history, our geology, our environment are inscribed in the granite bands on the ground plane.”

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Word Art

At the Denver Art Museum I found this amazing (and gigantic) piece, Pater Noster by Sean Landers. It is more of a journal than a painting, chronicling the artist’s life while he prepares for a show — a time that also includes his partner’s pregnancy, the birth of his child, and the sudden death of his father. It is rare for people stop and stay with any one piece for longer than a few seconds, but this one had such a large crowd we were jockeying for position to continue reading his funny, poignant story. After thinking about it, this piece’s popularity should not be a surprise. A common art museum comment is “What in the world is that supposed to be?” Here, we know exactly what the artist is trying to say because he is saying it, literally.

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Bird Mural

One night recently an old friend was in town, and we met in the Mission for dinner. It was one of those rare nights in the city where the weather is perfect and there isn’t a hint of the usual chilly wind. We just started walking with no destination in mind, chatting and giggling over tacky wares in the windows. At one point we ducked down some street or another — I probably couldn’t find it again — and we happened on this fun mural around the corner from an antiques store I’d love to have gone in if it had been open. I’m attracted to the cartoon quality of the mural, but what really sold it is how it incorporated the ugly, omnipresent city power lines into the scene.