![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Bicycles and Big Art
Dec. 23rd, 2008 01:19 pmWhile I wait in the airport to see if I will actually be able to get on my flight, I might as well fill in the gaps from the last couple of days. Mostly Sunday, actually. On Sunday morning, I got up early and met up with P and R to ride over to Camelback for a bike&hike. I managed to reach mile 5000 on the Jolly Roger just as we reached the trailhead for the hike. Of course, my odometer read 6803 because I never reset my it from the year before (see pictures below the cut at the end).
I've been thinking about what 5000 miles means ever since I reached it. Does it mean I should try to ride more miles next year? Not necessarily--I don't really care about setting a new record. I also don't have a frame of reference for it because it's the first full year I've had the odometer, and it isn't like I was trying to go particularly fast or anything. Still--5000 miles. Almost 100 miles a week.
It does give me a reason to think back to the most memorable of those miles, for example, riding on the north rim of the Grand Canyon and riding from Seattle to Portland. There are also countless picnics to remember, and other grand adventures, on top of all of the trips to the farmer's market, the Orange Table, various cupcake establishments, and countless coffeeshops. And I'll never forget the trip out to Seven Springs. So it has been a good year, maybe even the best year of my entire life. Altogether, I'm probably in the best shape I've ever been in, especially compared to the prior year when I had mono and couldn't ride for two months.
So that made for a memorable Sunday morning.
Sunday afternoon was a completely different experience. There has been a fair amount of hubbub about artwork by Chihuly on display in the Desert Botanical Gardens. I figured it would be fun to check it out as a special event to celebrate the winter Solstice. The plants were beautiful as usual, and it was great to get to hang out with J without trying to keep up with the boys, but Chihuly's stuff left me decidedly underwhelmed.
I approach Chihuly's work from the perspective of a ceramicist. Several months ago, when I was focusing on throwing pieces on the wheel, my ceramics class contained a couple of guys who were new to our program, though not new to ceramics. The primary concern of these guys quickly became apparent: they wanted to throw BIG pieces. My ceramics instructor gently pointed out that in her experience it's pretty common for male ceramicists to focus on making BIG things, while losing out on the creativity involved in delicately shaping clay. I wasn't particularly surprised by this observation, but tucked it away in the back of my mind for future reference.
This idea applies well to Chihuly's stuff. He makes big, bold pieces. But that's about it, and they're decidedly boring and uninteresting. One of the only interesting parts of the show was a video of how the Chihuly group actually creates sculptures at the Museum of Glass. This video, which had an utterly ridiculous quasi-"badass" soundtrack (ugh), highlighted the skills required to construct and shape so many giant, tubular, squiggly things. Clearly, one must have high heat tolerance and big muscles to heft around huge pieces of molten glass. Monstrous furnaces and other heating implements that require vast amounts of energy are also imperative. That's all impressive, I suppose, and it's nice to know that someone has become a superhero for championing an underappreciated medium, but still.
The DBG contains an exquisite collection of desert-adapted plants, which are most remarkable for their subtlety. The giant glass sculptures interspersed between cacti did little for the natural beauty of the plants and stuck out as too bright and obnoxiously loud and squiggly. They didn't respond to the plants or the space or resonate in the unusual context in the way I'd hoped. Putting art among the plants was an unprecedented opportunity, but it was wasted.
Rather than dwell on mediocrity, I'll just say that seeing the process of glass-blowing made me grateful for art forms that are more hands-on, that carry the mark of their maker. Ceramics also involves glass (glaze-work), and yet in a completely different fashion because the glass is applied to the outside of hand-shaped materials and interacts with the clay. It seems to me that works of clay would respond more effectively to the shapes and colors of the natural world because clay presents a more versatile palette. Much more could even be accomplished with pure glass: I was awestruck after seeing the collection of glass flowers at Harvard's Peabody Museum, though those lifelike flowers are so delicate they cannot be moved, let alone put out in the elements. But they suggest that there's a lot of untapped opportunity in the medium.
So, do I think anyone should go see Chihuly's work on display in the Gardens? Not for the artwork, though the plants are always a pleasure to behold.
( various photographs from the day - clicky for larger )
I've been thinking about what 5000 miles means ever since I reached it. Does it mean I should try to ride more miles next year? Not necessarily--I don't really care about setting a new record. I also don't have a frame of reference for it because it's the first full year I've had the odometer, and it isn't like I was trying to go particularly fast or anything. Still--5000 miles. Almost 100 miles a week.
It does give me a reason to think back to the most memorable of those miles, for example, riding on the north rim of the Grand Canyon and riding from Seattle to Portland. There are also countless picnics to remember, and other grand adventures, on top of all of the trips to the farmer's market, the Orange Table, various cupcake establishments, and countless coffeeshops. And I'll never forget the trip out to Seven Springs. So it has been a good year, maybe even the best year of my entire life. Altogether, I'm probably in the best shape I've ever been in, especially compared to the prior year when I had mono and couldn't ride for two months.
So that made for a memorable Sunday morning.
Sunday afternoon was a completely different experience. There has been a fair amount of hubbub about artwork by Chihuly on display in the Desert Botanical Gardens. I figured it would be fun to check it out as a special event to celebrate the winter Solstice. The plants were beautiful as usual, and it was great to get to hang out with J without trying to keep up with the boys, but Chihuly's stuff left me decidedly underwhelmed.
I approach Chihuly's work from the perspective of a ceramicist. Several months ago, when I was focusing on throwing pieces on the wheel, my ceramics class contained a couple of guys who were new to our program, though not new to ceramics. The primary concern of these guys quickly became apparent: they wanted to throw BIG pieces. My ceramics instructor gently pointed out that in her experience it's pretty common for male ceramicists to focus on making BIG things, while losing out on the creativity involved in delicately shaping clay. I wasn't particularly surprised by this observation, but tucked it away in the back of my mind for future reference.
This idea applies well to Chihuly's stuff. He makes big, bold pieces. But that's about it, and they're decidedly boring and uninteresting. One of the only interesting parts of the show was a video of how the Chihuly group actually creates sculptures at the Museum of Glass. This video, which had an utterly ridiculous quasi-"badass" soundtrack (ugh), highlighted the skills required to construct and shape so many giant, tubular, squiggly things. Clearly, one must have high heat tolerance and big muscles to heft around huge pieces of molten glass. Monstrous furnaces and other heating implements that require vast amounts of energy are also imperative. That's all impressive, I suppose, and it's nice to know that someone has become a superhero for championing an underappreciated medium, but still.
The DBG contains an exquisite collection of desert-adapted plants, which are most remarkable for their subtlety. The giant glass sculptures interspersed between cacti did little for the natural beauty of the plants and stuck out as too bright and obnoxiously loud and squiggly. They didn't respond to the plants or the space or resonate in the unusual context in the way I'd hoped. Putting art among the plants was an unprecedented opportunity, but it was wasted.
Rather than dwell on mediocrity, I'll just say that seeing the process of glass-blowing made me grateful for art forms that are more hands-on, that carry the mark of their maker. Ceramics also involves glass (glaze-work), and yet in a completely different fashion because the glass is applied to the outside of hand-shaped materials and interacts with the clay. It seems to me that works of clay would respond more effectively to the shapes and colors of the natural world because clay presents a more versatile palette. Much more could even be accomplished with pure glass: I was awestruck after seeing the collection of glass flowers at Harvard's Peabody Museum, though those lifelike flowers are so delicate they cannot be moved, let alone put out in the elements. But they suggest that there's a lot of untapped opportunity in the medium.
So, do I think anyone should go see Chihuly's work on display in the Gardens? Not for the artwork, though the plants are always a pleasure to behold.
( various photographs from the day - clicky for larger )
