Zainol

Regular visitors to the blog already know Zainol's work.  Actually, anyone who's been here has seen his work.

Zainol is a Malaysian artist.  I bought three small paintings from him back in 2005 I think when I went to a conference in Malaysia.  I immediately fell in love with the pictures, but as a very light packer, didn't even consider buying them.  But the artist - it was an outdoor art fair in Kuala Lumpur - convinced me they were light and would survive the trip and they made it back to Anchorage.

When I began this blog in 2006, I figured out quickly that I wanted the pictures, somehow, into the banner on top.  It fit the idea of What Do I Know?   I finally got a picture I wanted and figured out how to add some writing.  But I couldn't figure out how to get it the right size to fit in the banner.  That didn't happen until May 2007 when I put up a brief post about the blog's new look.

I wanted to let Zainol know that I'd used the picture for my blog, but I couldn't contact him.  I couldn't find him on google.

Yesterday, as part of moving the upstairs downstairs as we get ready for painting, I took the three pictures off the wall.

[I had to put them back up so I could take the picture and I didn't check the alignment carefully.  I put them up with I on the left and III on the right.  They hung straighter before so I think I had them in a different order.]

So when I took them down, on the back was the name of the painting and the artist.  It was easy to google and I got Zainol Ariffin Mustafa Alfandi's Facebook page right away.  

Then I tried to find where I wrote about the picture I used for the blog header.  It wasn't in my personal information or on the right column.  I searched the blog for Zainol but Blogger hasn't been good about finding words in the older posts.  So I added something on the right sidebar near the top.  

But it bothered me and so yesterday I looked through the posts for 2006 and then 2007 until I found it in May 2007.  I didn't include a picture.  I guess I figured the banner was good enough.  

But now I can include Zainol's full name and his FB link in case anyone is interested in his art.  Thanks, Zainol.  The paintings are still fresh, beautiful, and thought provoking.  

So, people who visit here often have seen part of one of Zainol's painting often.  Now you can go to his FB page and learn a bit more about him.  And I can fully recognize him here.  

Impressive Student Art At Anchorage Museum

When my granddaughter was here last we, we visited the museum to see the children's art exhibit.




Conlan Cantrell
Grade 5
Sand Lake Elementary[Commenter 2/26/21 says Conlan went to Chugiak, not Sand Lake]

This is a close-up of the picture.

Katherine Reinbold

Grade 5

Sand Lake Elementary

Randy Lee
Grade 4
Williwaw Elementary
Saxophone

Emory Banker

Grade 12

West High

Amaeli Kam-Magruder

Pink Rose

Grade 7

Mears Middle School

Ada Bjorkman
Self Portrait
Grade 8
Rilke Schule German Charter School

Abigail Barios

Grade 8

Wendler Middle School

Ann Bebauer
Lichen
Grade 12
Service High School

Francis Giovanni Anino

Cousin JoAnne

Grade 12

Service High School

Brian Cuevas Fuentes

High School Wolf

Grade 9

West High School

Kristine Felipe
La Muerte
Grade 11
West High School















This is by no means a selection of the best.  There were lots and lots of works of art.  These were a few that caught our eye.  And a friend had strongly recommended that we visit the polar bears, and it was a great idea.  These are real kid magnets and the guard watched carefully as we walked into the room (in the new addition that was completed last year.)  But my munchkin had lots of self control.

Paola Pivi’s Polar Bears

Enjoying Rare Seattle Sun

To my great surprise, the rain ended Sunday morning and the sun came out.












So we walked to the playground.

And then to the museum.

From the Bainbridge Island Art Museum site:

"Serve is a 14-foot hand-fabricated stainless steel fork. This sculpture takes the ideas surrounding the spoons and brings them to the forefront of my consciousness. Serve represents the silent, but giant, role of women in households over generations - lovingly nurturing their families. Serve is about power, but the protective kind.

This large-scale fork also becomes other things – the nude figure, or a flamenco dancer. Gradually it leaves me, the artist – it becomes alive and starts to move on its own."

Move on its own it has.  The person at the desk told us the fork was to remind folks of the people around the world who are hungry.


Note:  The sun was washed out in the original of the tree picture, so I figured I could play around with photoshop's curves and filters to make it more interesting.  And I don't post pictures of my family, so I had to mess with the playground shot too.  And the image of the fork I'd gotten was just too busy, so back again to photoshop.  I like how manipulating the photos shows me things I didn't see with just my eyes, or even the camera.  There were other interesting exhibits but they need to be unaltered, so I may do another post.  Or not.

The New Thai Kitchen, Homegoing to Cleveland and to Ghana, Bending Toward Justice, And Tree Shadow

The Thai Kitchen, after 30 years, was closing briefly to move a few spaces down the mall, next to the Yogurt place that they also own.  That was going to happen after we left in December, and Saturday night we went to see the new place.  Here's Sommai at the stove and some of the flowers for the new opening.

The overall space is a little smaller, but it's new and fresh and it has a door directly to the Yogurt place so you can get dessert after your Thai meal.

And it has some new menu items.  Kow Soi is a great Chiengmai noodle curry that we enjoyed while we were in Chiengmai.  (Transliterations into English from Thai can vary.)  I  Also the new spicy cabbage was good.


Today I got my teeth cleaned and picked up a book at the UAA library.  Coming out I passed the small gallery next to the library entrance and was impressed with the pictures there by Michael Conti.  The sign said he grew up in near Cleveland and last summer went back for a couple of months fine arts residency funded by the Rasmuson Foundation at Zygote Press, ant art printshop.  I liked what he learned to do with his photos.  Here are a couple examples.

There also was this poster for a free lecture Thursday (Feb 1) at the Wendy Williamson auditorium that sounded interesting.  Marika Anthony-Shaw:  Collective Impact:  Bending Toward Justice.   7:30pm












And finally, walking the rest of the way home I had to wonder about whether trees check out their shadows to see how they look.

I'm sure the appreciate the warmth radiating back from the sunlit wall next to them in any case.





The book club is meeting here tonight so I have some cleaning up to do.  I made a Ghanian peanut soup last night - we read Yaa Gyasi's Homegoing, which follows the generations of two half-sisters - one who is taken as a slave to the new world and one who stays behind in Ghana from the late 1700s to the almost present.  Interesting book, lots of insights, but you have to keep on your toes as the characters change with each generation in two continents.

Surface Tension LA and Noah's Ark

The Skirball Museum was chosen as a kid friendly meeting place for my daughter and an old friend.  There were two dynamite exhibits - one temporary and one permanent.  If you're ever in LA with young kids, be sure to check out the permanent one.



First The Temp Exhibit - Surface Tension LA


The most striking thing when you walk into the room is the map of LA on the floor.  It has every street. But no names.  It goes from the beach on the west to way off in the east, well past East LA.  I confess, it's part of LA I don't know at much about and there were no red circles with numbers out there so I didn't look too carefully.  North/south is more constrained - from the near valley north to not even LAX to the south.  There's a bit of South LA that goes out the doorway into the hall.

Z immediately began running the freeways.

And you can also see the red circles that have numbers.

The numbers show the locations of murals which are pictured on the wall.  The picture below just shows a few of them.

Just checking out the city and trying to figure out where places were without the street names.  It made curved streets make more sense in this huge map format.  And then there were all the murals.  Some of which I knew - including the "Pope of LA" that we saw in downtown the other day.

And the security guard was really into the project, asking us what we thought it meant.  He went on to say something about no one mural tells the story, but the combination of all the murals makes a statement.

Ken Gonzales-Day who conceived of this project and took thousands of pictures of murals, wrote on a description of the exhibit in the room:

"I believe these images reveal more about Los Angeles and its communities, its struggles and its losses, than one can find in any book.  I witnessed memorials to those lost and to those who inspire, as well as the rage and political frustration of city residents, and even resistance to displacement.  In a city of contested spaces, these are traces of its people:  material celebrations and negotiations of the politics of place, often painted side by side."

Gonzales-Day is an art professor at Scripps College in Claremont.  His personal website has more on his art, including a larger picture of this exhibit with many more of the murals.  It's the third dot at the top of the page.


Second, The Permanent Exhibit - Noah's Ark

I have to say upfront that this is the best interactive kid space I can recall ever having been to, and I've been to a lot.  It's aesthetically beautiful, it's resourceful, imaginative, and full of interesting things for kids - and adults - to do.  They also limit how many people can be in the space - you get tickets that are good for a specific 90 minute block.  We had 2pm-3:30 on the Saturday before Christmas.  There was lots of room for the kids to explore.

If you live in LA and have young kids (3-9 is probably ideal) or your visiting from out of town, this is a great spot to go.  It's not photogenic - big pictures don't show the detail, which is what's so amazing, and pictures of the details miss out on how it all fits together.  Maybe it would be fairer to say I wasn't up to the task of digitally capturing this place.  Plus I only had my small camera with me and my kids have a ban on family pictures on the blog.

But here are a few attempts.

There's just so much going on in the room, so many nooks and crannies, so many animals, things to push or pull or crank or climb up, under, into.  This is one room that is 'inside the ark.'

We first got a kid friendly intro to what we were going to see.  Part one was the storm, with rain and wind and lightning.  Part two is the ark.  Part three is the rainbow, a room where everyone can work with paper and colored pencils and stencils.  World Immigration Day was earlier in the week, so there was a place to write notes to immigrants and hang them up.

Most everything in this exhibit is made of recycled objects.  As you can see, the elephant's trunk is partly made of bamboo steamer baskets. It was all very clever.  Like this alligator, made out of a violin case, violin and the teeth are little plastic tubes.

In the storm room, there were lots of cranks to turn.  This one made lightning in the glass tube.  Another blew air into a tube  showing wind as the leaves inside flew all over.  And there were drums and other ways to recreate thunder.

There were neat ways to climb up.  A pulley to send messages or whatever up to folks on a different level.














And interesting ways to get back down.

There wasn't any real biblical indoctrination - just the most basic telling of the story of Noah's ark and the animals.  They even had fake animal poop in the section of the ark that held the animals.  And brooms and dustbins to clean it up with.

A truly wonderful place for young kids to explore and climb and have great adventures.

Here's where you can learn a lot more about Noah's Ark.

DTLA With My Granddaughter and Wife Part 2: Who Killed Liberty, Maiolino, And Roses

[Part 1 is here.]

We left off in the Museum of Contemporary Art in downtown Los Angeles.  As we moved along we came across this image of the statue of liberty by Daniel Joseph Martinez.  When I found the title - Who Killed Liberty, Can You Hear That, It's the Sound of Inevitability, The Sound of Your Death - it made sense.  But I wondered about more politically conservative people.  How might they react to this?  Even though they rail against government, how their religious rights are violated by things like gay marriage, how they are economically less well off, etc., would they appreciate this symbol of all those things?  Or would they see it as a desecration of a traditional monument to freedom?  Or have they soured on the Statue of Liberty because it represents a pro-immigration stance?

click on image to enlarge and focus

Then we walked a little further and saw this work extended into the next room.    This  second picture was taken by Z, my four year old partner in crime.  She has had no trouble picking up how to turn on the camera, how to press part way to focus, take the picture, then  open the window and press the view button, then move from picture to picture.  And her composition isn't bad either, though she did cut off the base of the statue.  The base is a mirror and she got in trouble with the guard for touching it.  My wife was closer to Z at the time, so she got written up, though the guard was apologetic and said there was clearly no damage and nothing would come of it.  

The main exhibit was by an artist I'd never heard of - Anna Maria Maiolino - but who had a large body of work in many different media.   There was a large room of pieces with torn paper, some of which was sewn up, or thread played a key role in the image.  Here are a couple of examples of the torn paper without thread.  (My camera had difficulty knowing what to do - I take that as a tribute to the artist who was tricking the camera's auto settings and chiding my slow progress in mastering the manual commands.  The first two attempts came out almost white.)

Here's a close up of another one with torn paper.  I think the original was much whiter, but I don't have it in front of me, so I'm not going to try to fiddle with the photo to replicate something I'm not sure of.

Here's something on the artist.

This one was called By A Thread and shows the artist in the center attached by threads to her mother and daughter.






And this one is The Hero.

But let's look at different media.






I was enjoying the shapes and positioning and textures and the imagination that created these pieces, I really wasn't of thinking about what it all meant, so I didn't take pictures of the descriptions, so I can't give these names.

Don't know what these are, but I do remember looking to see what they are made of - cement.

And finally, still Maiolino,

You can see a lot more images of her work at the MOCA website.


One of the downtown places I'd never been to, but had heard about and wanted to see was the Last Book Store.  But first, this mural we passed as we walked to the bookstore.  An exhibit on murals in LA we saw today at the Skirball says this is Eloy Torrez' "Pope of Broadway."  The sun was brightly reflecting off the wall fading out the colors, and with a four year old in tow, it's harder to run back up the block to from where the colors were better.

Then finally to The Last Bookstore.

I'm afraid I was expecting the most incredible bookstore ever.  It isn't.  Powell's in Portland is much better.  I like Elliot Bay Bookstore in Seattle better.  This one is quirkier than those two.









This building was a bank before it became a bookstore (a transformation I highly approve of.)  You can even go into the old safe to peruse books.  Maybe I just needed more time to get the feel of this place, but I as I walked through aisles and aisles of books, books weren't calling out to me to stop and pick them up.  And there are lots of signs saying, "No public restrooms."   This was more a bookstore in a gritty downtown block that seemed to be trying to figure out how to discourage the homeless.

It wasn't warm and inviting.  There were some places to sit and read, but not enough.

Z found a book she liked in the kids' section and her grandmother, of course, made sure it came home with us.  We wandered down to the Metro station - Z never stopped looking around, never complained about anything, and when I asked if she wanted to stop at the rose garden on the way home enthusiastically said yes.  So we got off at the Exposition Park station for a quick fragrance check on as many roses as we could before the next train came by.

This is a rose garden that I visited as a young child myself.  The Natural History Museum is nearby as well as the coliseum,

Wikipedia says the garden is seven acres.

"In 1986, plans to dig up the garden to build an underground parking garage led to protests in the media.^[15][17] The Los Angeles Times ran an editorial opposing the plan: "There are times when the leaders of Los Angeles seem perversely intent on living up to the image that many outsiders have of them—insensitive and uncouth rabbits who would, say, dig up a garden to put in a parking lot."^[18] The garden had also been threatened by an earlier proposal by the Los Angeles Raiders football team to convert the garden into a practice field for the team.^[16] In order to protect the garden from such threats, it was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1991."

I also read that the garden is closed from January 1 to March 1 for pruning, so this was likely the last chance to see these flowers this year for us.

And as I look at this last picture, I can't help but see similarities between this rose and the Disney Concert Hall that began Part 1 of these DTLA posts.