Downtown art
While San Diego frequently loses out to Los Angeles when it comes to seriously good commercial galleries, it does have a fantastic Museum of Contemporary Art, with buildings downtown and at La Jolla. The MCASD has a great location at 1001 Kettner Boulevard ...... in a building which is part of the main trolley (tram) station, so browsing is frequently interrupted by the rumbling of the passing trolleys, and the red blur as they woosh past the windows of the space downstairs. It's great! That's the MCASD on the right (above), with the sign of the big yellow cross. You can catcch trolleys from here to Tijuana, and to San Diego's Old Town and various sporting arenas.
Recently, the museum expanded into a new space on the other side Kettner, which continues the station theme: this new part, the Jacobs Building, is the renovated baggage building of the historic Santa Fe train depot.This is a beautiful old railway station built in the lovely Spanish mission style. Inside the main hall there's a vaulted and beamed ceiling and the walls between the arched windows are covered in beautiful tiles. We had a quick stroll through the gallery at 1001 Kettner, but were more excited to see that the artist exhibiting across the road in the Jacobs Building was Maya Lin, the young American artist and architect who had designed and created the stunning Vietnam Veterans' Memorial in Washington DC. (I fell over when I was taking this pic in April — effective isn't it?) Maya Lin won a big public competition in 1981 to design this memorial, when she was just 21. When the public found out her work wasn't going to be another traditional piece of sculpture — in which DC abounds — there was enormous outcry. But she seemingly won over the entire country when, at just 22 years of age, she spoke before the US Congress about her design, a representational wound in the earth that symbolises the loss of 58,000 young Americans. The names of every one of them are inscribed into the highly polished black granite wall, and it is without question one of the most moving of all the momuments and memorials in DC. Friends and families of the dead soldiers file past looking for their loved ones' names, and some even take rubbings or leave flowers and other little tributes.
Landscape and architecture play a big part in this artist's life and work, and her show in San Diego, Systematic Landscapes, combined the two in highly original ways. One room had a sculptural installation of 50,000 blocks of wood arranged on the floor in a hill, or a wave, that rose 3 m. Spectacular. Cameras weren't allowed in the museum (so I pinched the pic above from the MCASD website), but if you click here you'll see a brief video of this work being installed.
In another room, black aluminium tubing had been suspended from the ceiling in a grid of the contours of a submarine mountain, the very tip of which was an island in the south Atlantic, 1600 km from Antarctica. It was quite something to walk beneath it and look up into it.
:: We'd have finished the day with a visit to the MCA's third building, in La Jolla, but won't be venturing anywhere near there until the US Open is over. From my bedroom window, I can see the huge blimp hovering over the course on the cliffs at Torrey Pines, from which they film a lot of the aerial stuff.

Worshipping at the shrine
Our trip east last week was all about the pictures And a bit of sculpture..
I studied art history for three years in the '90s and I just can't tell you what it was like to see many of the works I'd only been able to study in books, or online, right there in front of me.
I couldn't get enough, so it was lucky that we only really scratched the surface of all that these two great cities have to offer. We'll have to go back and see more!
In Washington, we spent most of one day at the National Gallery, especially in the East Wing, which is full of the Modern stuff, an amazing building full of light and spaces like this (click on the pics to see them b-i-g!) ...... the red blades are part of a massive kinetic sculpture by Alexander Calder, and despite its size and weight, you could see it slowly and silently moving if you looked long enough.
There was a room of smaller Calders in the Museum of Modern Art in New York (below), and I just loved the calm of the monochrome setting:
The two cities each had a casting of an Alberto Giacometti sculpture, Hands Holding the Void, and while the Washington one stood alone against a wall ...the NY one had a lovely Picasso glowing behind her to keep her back warm!There were plenty of yummy treats on the top floor of the Smithsonian American Art Museum in DC, where they keep all the contemporary art:
The stripy painting is a three-dimensional Sean Scully, of whom I've long been a great admirer. I can't tell you about the neon/video installation map of the US states, because I actually ignored it to look at other stuff. Though looking at it in this pic, it looks pretty amazing, don't you think?
This is another view of the same fantastic room: And this is all quite apart from the wonders of the National Portrait Gallery, which shares this magnificent building.
In New York, MoMA was also full of mind-blowing spaces ...
... the views through the building, the scope of its walls and windows themselves as awesome as the artworks.
The black object (below), suspended by electric cable over this void in MoMA is an ordinary domestic fan. Free from a stand or a frame and left to swing by its long cord, it whirls over the heads of the people below, flying in random arcs and curves through the space.
Of course, after all the Big Names ...
my brain felt a lot like this:But oh! What a glorious way to spend a few days!
And our worshipping was in no way confined to the big galleries. there was plenty of great stuff all around us.
In SoHo, for example, I stumbled across this amazing work by a very talented and enigmatic Brooklyn street artist who signs himself Elbowtoe. I think this is his blog. He paints these (to me) Egon Schiele-style figures on stiff paper, cuts them out and pastes them about the city. Fantastic!
In midtown, we walked past the Lever Building almost every day, and the first time we did we saw this:
A man in a striped bobble hat wrapping an enormous sculpture of a pregnant woman. The sculpture, The Virgin Mother, is by Damien Hirst, no less! It had been standing here for six months and now it was time to move it out and bring in some new wonder.
Here the removal team has just started wrapping her head and feet in preparation for shifting her out of this spot and bringing in a new work. By the evening of that day she looked as though she'd been attacked by giant spiders:We were told the new work would be installed at midnight last Friday, but when we returned to check it out, the removal team was still building the enormous crane that was needed to lift this hefty Virgin Mother out of her plaza setting. The next morning, she was gone, but nothing had yet been installed in her place, so I can't tell you what masterpiece occupies this space now.
Oh, but these weirdly distorted sculptures of his own body, by Richard Dupont, are in the lobby gallery of the same building:Being in New York also provided the chance to visit Pace Gallery, which represents my very fave artist, Jim Dine. I had visited this gallery's website for years, checking out JD's prints, so it was a thrill and a half to actually visit it.
When I boldly asked to see some of Jim Dine's work, a very pleasant young woman came to talk to me. I told her that though I did not have the means to buy any of his work, I intended merely to worship at the shrine, so she smilingly pulled out some of the great man's prints to show me.
In truth, it is his more energetic, gestural plant drawings that are my absolute favourites, but just seeing his prints was an unforgettable moment.

Washington awash
We kept hearing about the cherry blossoms at Washington. Friends here in San Diego, flight attendants on the way there, taxi-drivers - they all mentioned the cherry blossoms.
We got in late at night, and it wasn't until we ventured out into the sunny morning, and walked from our hotel to the Mall (below), that we realised what all the fuss was about.The city centre is gobsmackingly, divinely beautiful to start with, with a magnificent view seemingly around every corner.
But I wasn't expecting the flowers.
These are all blooming along the sides of The Mall, which is a massive expanse of grassy parkland that starts at the Capitol and goes all the way to the Lincoln Memorial, a stretch of just over three kilometres long.
This is where The Mall cuts through the buildings of the Smithsonian Institution, any one of which could have occupied us for a day at least.
The first cherry trees were a gift to Washington and the US from Japan, and this is celebrated every year with a Cherry Blossom Festival. It was festival time while we were there, with fireworks set off at night over the Tidal Pool, which is like a billabong off the Potomac River.
Just the tiniest breeze sent petals fluttering to the ground like snow. Breathtaking.
And while I don't want or intend to bore you with an endless travelogue, I must just tell you about this very beautiful lady:She is Lady Elizabeth Linley, who became Mrs Richard Brinsley Sheridan. This Gainsborough portrait of her hangs in Washington's National Gallery of Art, directly opposite Napoleon and just round the corner from George Washington. So I bet they all have a lot to talk about when the lights are off and the tourists are gone!And she's my great-great-great-great-great-grandmother!