u/OppositeShore1878

Went to see the "Illuminate" display in San Francisco Civic Center. Pretty impressive close up. 49 laser installations in a grid, blasting changing colors into the sky. Especially good when the light passes through fog, so it looks like some sort of technicolor ghostly alien spacecraft is hovering overhead. There were some red / blue / white patterns, but also the whole rainbow of colors, in shifting patterns. Bubbles drifting through the lights, so a lot of sparkle as well. Even some hammocks hung from the scaffold posts so you can lie down flat and stare upwards.

I was more impressed than I thought I would be. Worth seeing. Easy walk from Civic Center BART station. There was music and a friendly low key crowd, you can look from a distance or stand right under the lights (they're mounted on a scaffold), even a bit of a Burning Man vibe if everyone at Burning Man came dressed prepared for fog and chill. :-)

Last night is tonight. https://illuminate.org/projects/7x7/

Several days ago I posted a picture and question about a John Singer Sargent watercolor from the current Monet & Venice exhibit at San Francisco's De Young Museum.

I thought I would do this separate post about an interesting historical aspect of the exhibit.

Monet went to Venice for the first (and only) time in Fall of 1908.

One of the famous scenes /settings / spaces of Venice is the Piasa San Marco and the buildings / structures surrounding it. All painted, watercolored, sketched, etched, uncounted thousands of times.

(Monet's wife in a 1908 letter from Venice, complains that they went to one popular painting point and implied it was hard to find a vantage because at least five other artists were there painting the same prospect. If I remember the exhibit text correctly, she added, with some asperity, that one of the artists presumably getting in the way of Monet was a woman.)

Anyway, the key familiar features of the Piazza San Marco are St. Mark's Basilica, St. Mark's Campanile, the Doge's Palace (Palazzo Ducale), Pocuratie Vecchie, Marciana Library, the multi-section plazas themselves, and some prominent monuments including the winged Lion of St. Mark on a pedestal near the Grand Canal embankment and four ancient Roman copper horses (that the Venetians looted from Constantinople where they had stood for a millennia, and Napoleon looted hundreds of years later from Venice.)

And Monet, almost always incorporating water into his views of Venice, painted the scene from across the Grand Canal multiple times, emphasizing the canal, Palazzo Ducale, but also including the Piasa to its left and St. Mark's Campanile.

But...there was one temporary defect to this famous vista at the time. St. Mark's Campanile had catastrophically collapsed into a massive pile of bricks in 1902, temporarily removing the most famous tower from the Venetian skyline.

When Monet was there six years after the disaster, the shaft had been rebuilt but the spire of the tower was not yet constructed. So the tower looked like a tall stump, with a flattish top, not a tapering campanile.

And...Monet, in several versions of the same across the water view, painted it that way. But he had the incomplete tower top somewhat merge into haze, rather than showing it in stark relief against a clear sky.

By the time he exhibited his Venice paintings in 1912, the tower rebuild had been completed and, presumably using photos or prints of the new (or old) tower, he added the spire in to at least one of his paintings. But the others were left with an incomplete tower, as he had seen it in person.

Several of these paintings of the same scene (five, I think?) were lined up on one gallery wall in the exhibit giving a rare opportunity to compare and contrast.

Because most of his paintings of Venice were done with a filmy haze, what he did with the tower works pretty well. When I first walked along the wall of paintings I didn't even focus on the missing spire, I just thought, oh, he's partially obscured the tower top in mist and a haze of light. I didn't understand what was going on until I read the caption which discussed the incomplete tower.

Of the three images I've posted, the first two show the tower stump, as Monet would have seen it sitting there on the other side of the Grand Canal. But the third one shows the green copper spire. And the exhibit catalogue says that Monet added it in France, by the time the paintings were going to exhibit, four years later.

Which all leads to a question.

Does anyone know of any other notable painters / artists who included the unfinished tower in their work?

There's an interesting traveling exhibit entitled "Monet and Venice" which originated at the Brooklyn Museum and is now at the De Young Museum in San Francisco through July 26. https://www.famsf.org/exhibitions/monet-venice It brings together several of the paintings Monet did during (or after) his only visit to Venice, in 1908. There are also numerous other artworks (Renoir, Canaletto, John Singer Sargent included) and period photographs to set the context.

Above is a photo of a John Singer Sargent watercolor study in the exhibit, "The Liberia Marciana, Venice". (The Marciana Library).

Second image is the lower left corner, where someone (Sargent?) wrote "Cut off" in large cursive, with an arrow to a line above.

Clearly it wasn't cut off. :-)

Would Sargent have intended this as a reminder to himself to ignore that portion of the view if he did a follow-up painting of the study? Or might this have been an unfollowed instruction for possible later framing? (It's displayed in a modern frame / mat at present).

Thoughts?

I'm not familiar enough with Sargent's technique and approach to know if he wrote notes on his draft works routinely.

Mystery watercolor first half of 20th century. This looks to me like a fairly accomplished watercolorist was trying to meticulously and accurately show this town, down to the details of each house, and also create an intricate and beautiful work.

Matted, but not framed. Signature and date in lower right (and third photo).

I often make mistakes trying to figure out cursive handwritten signatures and handwritten dates, so I'm going to look to your expertise first, rather than giving my guesses upfront.

Watercolor is currently in California and it does look somewhat like a California landscape. It would be wonderful if anyone recognized the town / setting. My best guest would be coastal Northern or central California, or Sierra foothills. But no definitive proof it shows California. Google image search turns up nothing but faintly similar watercolors and the generic description "appears to depict a hillside town with winding roads and numerous houses." Yes, that it does.

Fourth image is the back, it looks like the watercolor is taped down under another piece of backer board. No frame, and perhaps never had a frame, given how the mat is so badly chipped and discolored.

Sorry about the quality of the photos, was photographing it fairly quickly and not in good lighting conditions.

Nearly two weeks ago I did a brief post about plans to temporarily paint the "South San Francisco The Industrial City" sign red, white, and blue for the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.

That post is here, with several useful comments by Redditors about the sign's history of being painted and repainted (usually in un-authorized ways).

https://www.reddit.com/r/bayarea/comments/1tuus6g/south_san_francisco_sign_to_be_painted_red_white/

This week I finally had a chance to see it in person. Posting a couple of pictures for those of you not on the Northern Peninsula. Second photo is more of a closeup.

The comments on the previous post are accurate, the color choice inadvertently ended up making "San Francisco" visually disappear, at least from a distance, and the sign appear to read just "South" (in red) "The Industrial City" (in white).

Side note, an Instagram post from South San Francisco explained that the Red / Blue / White color scheme instead of Red / White / Blue was chosen so the words "San Francisco" wouldn't be the part standing out most boldly.

Here's the schedule for free / outdoor movies in Berkeley parks this summer. This year they're shifting between seven parks, from Strawberry Creek to Codornices. To see the list of movies you'll need to open the link. :-) It does seem a kid-friendly list, with some classic movies as well.

Movies start June 12 and run through August 21, but not every week.

https://berkeleyca.gov/community-recreation/news/watch-free-movies-berkeley-parks-summer

Hello Kind Redditors:

Over in r/whatisthispainting a floral still life has been posted, and we've been trying to identify it and the era in which it was painted. My guess to date has been it was painted in the late 19th or early 20th centuries, and that the vase the flowers are in might be an East Asian, perhaps Japanese, piece, maybe made for the export trade. But I'm no expert in that area.

Can anyone here give an educated guess / opinion on whether the vase looks like it could be an East Asian design / character? Or not (I'm happy to be proven wrong, if the evidence from experts points in another direction.)

I think the flowers are carnations.

I've posted above a screen shot of the painting. Here's a link to the original post and discussion thread to date.

https://www.reddit.com/r/WhatIsThisPainting/comments/1twc4ub/can_anyone_help_me_date_this_painting/

https://botanicalgarden.berkeley.edu/event/community-free-day-with-bampfa-maren-hassinger-exhibition/

https://bampfa.org/visit/calendar

They have a joint exhibit, and Sunday the 7th is a "Community Day" for both facilities with no admission charge to either.

The Botanical Garden is always worth visiting, and BAMPFA is worth going on a free day.

(Note, the BAMPFA calendar says "Free gallery admission all day" for Sunday the 7th, which I'm assuming means all the galleries in the museum, not just the new exhibit. Their website is a bit unclear. If I'm wrong, I hope someone will correct me in the comments.)

Was walking along Piedmont and saw this. It does look like a nice, friendly, huggable bear statue.

Noticed this last week. A bunch of green tiles are gone from the upper facade. It almost looks like tiles have been intentionally taken off, because they're missing in irregular sections with clean edges.

Does anyone know what's going on?

And I confess in advance I haven't looked at Soda for a long time, so if the building has been this way for months...please don't hesitate to tell me.

I've bid on Invaluable, Liveauctioneers and house auction sites, and frequently in person at local auctions.

I recently bid for the first time in a Chairish auction, through Liveauctioneers (which now owns Chairish?).

The opening bid was $260. I bid that in advance, and then set a max bid of $300.

When I checked back a day or two later, I was still the only bidder, but my opening bid displayed had somehow been unilaterally increased $20 to $280.

When the auction took place, there were no other bids registered (I watched it live) so I won...for $280. The bid record (see image attached) literally says "Starting Price $260", followed by "My Bid, $280."

I exchanged some unsatisfying emails with Chairish and they seemed to imply they had unilaterally increased my opening bid by $20 because of a hidden reserve, although they didn't say what the reserve was. (It seems odd that the reserve would be just $20 above the opening bid).

Is this actually how hidden reserves work?

I thought that a hidden reserve simply meant that if the competitive bidding didn't reach the reserve price, the lot was "Passed". Not that the auction house could essentially have me bid against myself until the reserve was reached.

In this instance there were no other bidders / competitors. Shouldn't I have won the auction for $260...OR the auctioneer Passed the item because no one, including me, had bid competitively to the hidden reserve?

I just noticed this same thing apparently happening with another Chairish Auction I've been watching, but haven't bid in...yet. Opening bid was listed as $90 when the Lot appeared. ONE advance bid has been registered...and now that bid is listed as $180 (twice the listed opening price).

(For context, I do understand that other bids can come from various platforms. But Chairish Auctions now seems to operate only through the Liveauctioneers platform. And the Liveauctioneers summary did not register a "competing bid" in my case.)