Yellow Room Triptych

It is rare for our small town to make a splash in the Australian Financial Review, our main business newspaper. It did today because the local art gallery, one of the best in rural Australia, has just splashed a lot of money on a lovely painting by one of Australia's leading artists who died just recently, Margaret Olley. She liked it so much among her entire oeuvre that she refused to part with it, although widely admired by the art-world. With her death at age 88, those constraints were removed and Armidale's New England Regional Art Museum beat Sydney's Art Gallery of NSW to the punch. Margaret liked the New England district and our gallery, so it has found a natural home along with another major work gifted by the artist. I subscribed to the purchase fund.

Here's a picture of The Yellow Room Triptych. It could almost be a van Gogh! The picture measures 1.2 x 2.75 m.

AS

Wild Weather

Armidale's temperature range yesterday (25 June) was amazing: -9C to +16C (or 16F to 61F), a range of 25C (45F). This was a bit like deepest winter to almost summer in one day.

This happens because the air is crystal clear with little or no wind. Heat built up in the day dissipates quickly at night, and we are 1000m asl. During the day however there is brilliant sunshine which heats the ground rapidly. Even in mid-winter here, the angle of the sun is still quite high unlike in the UK where it barely 17 degrees above the horizon in December.

However, I don't like the cold mornings - and they're terrible for cycling!

AS

Rather Old

At the risk of duplication for some of my readers, I'm writing in connection with some recent dating of Aboriginal artefacts - the subject of my recent posting to Facebook. 

              

Australians travel widely in search antiquities, but tend to ignore our own. The pyramids, Parthenon and the Great Wall of China are incredibly recent compared with the 28,000 y.o. artwork in the cave pictured here. It's the Narwhal Gabarnmang Rock Shelter near Katherine in the Northern Territory.

Because the artists used charcoal for at least part of their work, the paintings and drawings could be dated accurately by radio-carbon means. There's evidence that the cave itself has been occupied for 45,000 years and other artefacts have been estimated at up to 35,000 years old.


Now for the sleazy bit! According to Britain's masterpiece of journalistic integrity, the Daily Mail, "these Australian cave paintings show [that] it's certainly not a modern thing for an artist to use his skills to portray sex and pornography"! Look closely, according to that Tabloid, and you'll see a couple in the act. Moreover, "Other sections of the wide-ranging artwork in white and red shows (sic) other figures engaged in some form of prehistoric porn”.
Read more at: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2161118/Aboriginal-erotic-rock-art-proves--28-000-years-ago--men-ONE-thing-minds.html#ixzz1yDmK1co4


And here's roughly where the artwork was found: near Katherine Gorge in the Nitmiluk Nation Park. Very remote!

AS

Fololi House

Embedded in the gardens you have just seen is the US equivalent of a stately home. It's only perhaps a century or so old and built on the back of a gold mine, and not even in the same league as Mount Vernon, the home of George Washington, which I have also visited. However, I think it more akin to the British idea of  a stately home than Hearst castle I reported on earlier this year. Have look at these pictures to verify my claim! The house, incidentally, was described as being as being 'Georgian' style - not a bad description, but maybe a century too late.

A lovely screen in the lounge.

A smallish, but well appointed, dining room.

A sitting room.

The library.

Another small lounge with the wine collection in a safe-room!

The ball-room with a grand piano at one end.

The ball-room had numerous murals like this one depicting scenes from Ireland - I presume the original owner's home country.

Nice isn't it?

AS

Filoli Gardens

I have visited many National Trust properties in Britain and Australia, but never one to my recollection in the US. That was remedied today by a trip to Filoli near Menlo Park, Palo Alto (Tall Tree) and Los Altos at the western end of Silicon Valley. The weather was glorious - sunny and warm - and the destination amazing. Indeed, it left in the shade several UK NT places I have visited. Perhaps the following images of the acres of landscaped gardens will illustrate my point.

Need I say more. It's well worth a visit, especially on a good day like today.

Party Day

Ella had her big party yesterday when many of her little friends (of about the same age) came around to celebrate the occasion. Her parents did a marvellous job preparing the excellent food and drink, arranging the seating, setting up play equipment and so on.

The cake was an elaborate affair in the shape of the number one and one candle was duly lit. Ella had no chance though of blowing it out as it was a windy day. I was lucky to get a picture when it was still burning!

The little wading pool has filled with plastic balls and these seemed popular, though the balls wandered. Ella, for one, loves dropping objects from her stroller or high chair ... or on this occasion the 'pool'.

Actually, the water action surrounded Ella's new water-works. The item shown below receives water deposited by a kind parent or scooped from the bottom reservoir with the cup provided. It then drops down through a water wheel on one side or a slide on the other into an intermediate level and this, in turn, lets the water cascade down a slope into the reservoir. The idea is simple, but provides the first scientific insight for one-year olds about gravity, flowing liquids and alternative sources of energy!

All told the party went on for over 4 hours with lots have happy children and their parents who, in silicon Valley fashion, had several different nationalities. It was highly successful!

AS

Ella's Tricycle

We gave Ella an up-market tricycle for her birthday. It's nearly all pink as the pictures show and has a cup holder and mobile phone (only a toy one), as well as a steering handle for the responsible adult doing the pushing. There's also a hood which flexes up and down to shield her from the sun. At her age when when she's still not walking, Ella cannot be expected to pedal - that comes later.

For now, she's infatuated with the freedom that the trike seems to bring and loves being pushed around while seeming to steer the thing. The trike also also gives Ella much more opportunity to see what's going around.

AS

Ella's First

Today, 30 May, was a signal day in Mountain View. Ella turned one year old!

We had a photo shoot to record the event formally, a birthday cake - known in these parts as a smash cake, a present opening session, and a birthday dinner in that order.

Here's one of the formal photos, where Ella is sitting on a pink rug in Emily and Greg's garden. Her favourite teddy bear is behind with a large helium balloon tethered to it in the shape of the number one.

Then came the opening of quite a lot of presents, though there will no doubt be a lot more on Saturday when she entertains her little friends for a kids' party. The first picture shows Ella trying on Uncle Phillip's hat. The second shows her inspecting the offerings.

Then came the smash cake, apparently a US invention where kids are presented with a cake designed for destruction. We saw Emily make the cake a day or so and a lot of effort went into for what promised to be a messy end. The flowers on it were made from little pieces of marshmallow with an M & M at the centre, and the edifice was topped by a large number one.

Well, Ella, who was suitably attired for a likely messy event on a hot day, disappointed us considerably. She ate the flowers with great decorum, one petal at the time. So Greg had to intervene and smash the cake with his fist, after which Ella tried some of the cake and its icing.

After we tidied up the mess and dressed more formally - me in a designer T-shirt and white shorts - we headed off for a celebration meal in a San Jose restaurant. If you recall an earlier post, Max's 6th birthday was in a Sushi Bar he selected. This time Ella was hardly in a position to select a restaurant, so we did that for her. It was an Ethiopian restaurant and the choice was entirely appropriate. It did not supply cutlery and the food was eaten with our hands and wrapped in a thin pancake before entering our mouths. Ella seemed quite at home with this strategy, though much Ethiopian food is hot and Ella appropriately made a face on some occasions. Here are pictures of the food and our guest of honour:

AS

A trip to Sausalito

Yesterday, Dot and I took refuge from the crowds along San Francisco's who'd come into town for Memorial day by taking the ferry across the bay to Sausalito. The trip there was lovely, with our little craft swaying in the pacific swell coming under the Golden gate bridge and passing Alcatraz, the subject of earlier post this year.

The town is attractively located on the north shore of the bay and is effectively an up-market commuter suburb + lifestyle hang-out for artists and creative people. It was also crowded with cyclists who head there across the Golden Gate and take the ferry back to the Embarcadero. And then there are the tourists like us who want to stroll among the art galleries, sip coffee at one of the innumerable and fortunately privately owned coffee houses, and admire the Mediterranean-style environment and atmosphere. As someone told us in Vancouver, "this city has over 100 Starbucks establishments, which is 95 too many!" The photos show what I mean.

By the way, the harbour was crammed with expensive yachts, a virtual forest of masts floating among some of the largest jelly-fish I've seen in the wild.

And here's Tiburon on the opposite side of the cove - a very similar place in lifestyle, though much more off the tourist circuit.

Notice for once the absence of SF's notorious fog! Although it looks warm and inviting, the northerly breeze was stiff and I doubt if the temperature got much above 17C.

AS

Fun in Stanley Park

Like all the world's great cities, Vancouver is proud of its magnificent open spaces. It has one of the largest public parks close to the city centre - Stanley Park, named after a 19th century governor of that name who help bring it to fruition. This dude stands proudly on his plinth at the entrance:

The park covers a thousand acres alongside the Burrard inlet on which Vancouver stands, and is close to down-town. Some is laid out in formal gardens as the following pictures show. There is for example a rose garden and areas dedicated to azaleas or other flowering plants and shrubs set among carefully cultivated lawns. Another part is host to a group of totem poles recording native heritage.

Yet other exhibits include this gun emplacement which fires a round every day at 9pm to sound the curfew, a tradition dating from the 19th century. And, like Copenhagen, a young lady sits perched on a rock - this time to mark high tide.

The grounds abound with forests of Douglas Fit, Hemlock, Spruce and other native species and these provide a home for lots of wildlife ... of which I was only able to spot the attached picture of a squirrel diving into a hedge.

But the biggest attraction so far was the aquarium, home to lots of species of fish and invertebrates along with various kinds of birds and mammals. The displays were well done and the facility was bursting at the seams with people the day we were there, which was a public holiday. The pictures show some lovely jellyfish, a rare Beluga Whale, some blue Macaws, and a group of highly endangered penguins from South Africa.

The park provided a lovely day out and also had spectacular views of the city and its surrounds.

AS