A week of Roaming

The roaming has been especially good this week including Sunday's walk around the Palm Springs Convention Center for their Fine Art Fair with 55 galleries from 25 cities and 3 countries showing fine art. 

The two paintings below were a couple of my favorites.

"Juno" by Daniel Phill, 2012 from the Sandra Lee Gallery at 251 Post Street, Suite 320 in San Francisco.

"Wexler House" by Andy Burgess, 2012-2013 at the Cynthia Corbett Gallery 15 Claremont Lodge, 15 The Downs, London, U.K.

On Monday it was off to Huntington Gardens, Museum, and Library for lunch and a walk around with friend, Bonnie.  We particularly enjoyed the children's garden which was full of delighted children off from school on Presidents' Day.  The garden is a creative place for children to explore and play in water, a misty fog, tunnels, and figures of animals.  It was fun to watch the small children picking up hand fulls of rocks and dropping them through a crevice with metal horizontal bars that sounded like chimes as the rocks fell through.  And of course the hundreds of camellia bushes are in full bloom.

Thursday I led the class at the V.A. as we finished this discussion of Picasso and art work created by Guy from our class.  He was there to discuss his creative digital process and hoped to hear that he had been a winner at the V.A. art show the day before.  Then some of us went on an outing to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art to see the Picasso paintings, sculptures and other works of art.

"Odyssey in Color" entry in the Digital Art category by Guy

"Pride Before Fall", entry in the Color Photography category, by Guy

Last night I was off to the Los Angeles Philharmonic concert at Disney Hall.  Conductor Gustavo Dudamel was back from his travels and led the orchestra is a feast of amazing music.  First was Siefgried's Death and Funeral Music from Gotterdammerung by Wagner.  The huge orchestra was bursting on the stage with 3 harps, two sets of timpani, cymbals, tenor drum, 5 French Horns, 5 Wagner Tubas, and three of each of the woods plus an English horn, 4 trombones, bass trombone, 3 trumpets, and of course a regular Tuba along with all the strings. 

That was followed by the Brahms Violin Concerto in D major with Gil Shaham.  Mr Shaham was amazing with his work on a piece that was written to challenge Brahms good friend, Joseph Joachim who he met when he left his Hamburg home at the age of 20.  The Concerto was first performed in Leipzig on New Year's Day 1879 by Joachim, the dedicatee, who composed the cadenza that Mr. Shaham played last night.  The soloist and conductor seemed to have a great friendship with Mr. Shaham grinning at Dudamel during the concert.  They hugged and bowed to each other and also to Ariana Ghez, who played a beautiful solo in the oboe.  After the break, the orchestra played Schumann's Symphony No. 3 which I also greatly enjoyed.

During the intermission, the key woodwind players were perhaps discussing the amazing first half of the evening.  Michele Zukovsky, is the Principal Clarinet, Whitney Crockett is the Principal Bassoon, Ariana Ghez, Principal Oboe, and a new lead flute player for the evening....could he be the new Principal Flute player??? We will see if an announcement is coming to fill the vacant Principal position.

The Orchestra awaits the conductor at the start of the second half of the evening's program.  Joseph Pereira is the amazing Principal Timpanist.