I have time to kill before leaving as I have been waking up around 5 or so a.m. Pacific time and I don't need to leave the hotel to head to the airport until around 9:45. The weather pattern here is much like I remember LA being at this time of year: cloudy and hazy in the early morning and around mid-morning it burns off to reveal clear blue skies. You can see in the photos from yesterday that when I set out from the hotel it was very hazy but by the time I had walked a few miles the clouds were gone. Yesterday after I chaired a session (THAT was contentious--glad my talk session wasn't like that)I went to the hotel art gallery. The conference is actually taking up space at two hotels--half here at the one I am in (Westin: one of those anonymous conference hotels) and the US Grant hotel (which is beautiful, right out of the mid-1800s--lots of dark wood and crystal chandeliers) and the Grant Hotel had the art gallery. I wandered around a bit inside--didn't like any of the painting (one was of Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz with her mouth open to reveal various characters from the movie--weird) and others were very realistic oils of book spines on shelves, but all the books were pop culture best sellers (like Stephen King's
It, or autobiographies by actresses and washed up politicians. Maybe that was the point, that they were trite, but who wants to look at that on their walls?). I did like a few ceramics pieces, not to buy, but to think about when I (if I) get back into making ceramics. Here they are (photos taken with a crappy phone camera):
The camera/phone lens isn't good enough to show the texture really, but they were quite cool--and not quite so neon looking, either.
This one I was impressed with. The ceramicist would have had to extrude or roll miles of wet clay, mark the sides, and then roll up small stretches (each 2-3 inches long) and then stick them together, all very slowly allowing each to dry so the lower levels could take the weight of the new clay, balanced against the problem that, if you let the clay get too dry it cracks and then has to be junked. Even if you work on three or four simultaneously, each piece would take several months before being ready to fire.
There were three of these.
This is a blown glass chandelier.
As I was looking at the scrolly vases, a woman who worked there appeared out of nowhere to talk to me about it. I said that I liked the work very much (translate: I admire the effort that went into it, and appreciate that it was well-executed). She took that to mean that I wanted to buy it. I said that I lived far away and didn't think hauling it home on the plane was practical. She insisted that they shipped all over the world. Ok, that was when I started to panic a bit. How do I get out of this? I then said the, "I'll have to think about it" line. She added, it
is less than $1000.00, implying, I suppose that further resistance would just be priggish. I was about to say, "If it is $950.00 less than $1000, you have a deal." But didn't. So from that point on, I had to avoid not only that hotel but the whole street.
The camera/phone lens isn't good enough to show the texture really, but they were quite cool--and not quite so neon looking, either.
This one I was impressed with. The ceramicist would have had to extrude or roll miles of wet clay, mark the sides, and then roll up small stretches (each 2-3 inches long) and then stick them together, all very slowly allowing each to dry so the lower levels could take the weight of the new clay, balanced against the problem that, if you let the clay get too dry it cracks and then has to be junked. Even if you work on three or four simultaneously, each piece would take several months before being ready to fire.
There were three of these.
This is a blown glass chandelier.
As I was looking at the scrolly vases, a woman who worked there appeared out of nowhere to talk to me about it. I said that I liked the work very much (translate: I admire the effort that went into it, and appreciate that it was well-executed). She took that to mean that I wanted to buy it. I said that I lived far away and didn't think hauling it home on the plane was practical. She insisted that they shipped all over the world. Ok, that was when I started to panic a bit. How do I get out of this? I then said the, "I'll have to think about it" line. She added, it is less than $1000.00, implying, I suppose that further resistance would just be priggish. I was about to say, "If it is $950.00 less than $1000, you have a deal." But didn't. So from that point on, I had to avoid not only that hotel but the whole street.
1 comment:
Chandelier is decidedly splendid.
xM
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