You may have noticed a group of golden brown rectangular stones swelling out of the ground in the Euclid Avenue median across from Severance Hall. I don't have a good photo yet, but I will post one soon. The work is by Murase Associates http://www.murase.com/flash/index.html founded by Robert Murase (1938-2005) a Japanese American landscape architect.

Maybe you were there at Gray's Auctioneers Inaugural Auction on Sunday June 17th? Doors opened at 10:30 am for one last opportunity to preview the over 200 lots of fine art, furniture and decorative items, and by noon, auction time, the room was packed with excited bidders.  Some of the people in the audience were old pros and others were new to the auction world.  This first auction had something to suit  everyone's taste and price range. Those who attended were glad they did!

Community gardens play an important role in our city and its neighborhoods.  They are a source of fresh produce for those who don't have the space at their own residence.  Gardening is a great form of exercise.  Being in contact with nature and the soil relieves stress.  A strong sense on community grows quickly in a shared gardening space.  Crime levels drop around community gardens. These are just a few of the reasons to support community gardening.

These photos were shot flying above the town of Barrow Alaska by my friend Katrina as she reach the end of an extraordinary cyber-educational adventure. Over the last 11 days she literally went that extra mile to make distance learning for NEO grade school students exciting and meaningful.

How many times in the last 10 -15 years I have gotten off the highway at the East 72nd Street exit of the Shoreway and winced at how depressing this mostly post industrial, impoverished landscape looks.

Toronto in spring is a romantic place. I discovered this when I spent the afternoon of Sunday April 22 on Queen Street West. I know there are many interesting districts in Toronto, for museums, dining, theater, and shopping, but I had been to Queen Street West before and I already knew that if pressed for time this street had more than enough to offer in the way of dining, arts and culture, and shopping. This was the first time I had experienced spring in Toronto. The last time I was on Queen Street it was mid November and beginning to snow. The sky was grey, it was a damp cold depressing day and outside at least, it wasn't much better than being in Cleveland. Mid-April is a totally different story though; the day was warm and sunny, almost like summer. Thousands of people were out, biking, walking, walking their dogs and children, and patios were open for dining. I started out with several objectives – get some good coffee and chocolate, find some birthday gifts for friends (children and adults), and take in some world class art and fashion.

Friday night I attended a reception and lecture at SPACES Gallery for select Cleveland organizations with interest in urban planning and sustainability. The current exhibition at Spaces, Shrinking Cities, explores strategies for post-industrial urban areas and should be of great interest to anyone interested in urban planning and sustainability. Terry Schwarz, Senior Planner at the Urban Design Center of Northeast Ohio, was to give a tour of the exhibition. My affiliation? I am an energy ambassador at Case. I am also an art historian, and although there are some witty, beautiful and innovative works represented in the exhibition the theme and the messages of the show truly over power the aesthetics. One could easily forget they are in an art exhibition.

Wednesday night's lecture at the Cleveland Clinic with Peter B. Lewis and Frank Gehry was everything I had expected and more. I doubt an audience member left without a new appreciation for the  positive,  transformative power of architecture, friendship and collaboration. It was inspiring just to be in the same room with two people who had made such great contributions to architecture. It was also inspiring to see two people, two friends, who worked so well together as client and architect. A testament to Gehry's fame, the lecture had very few visuals – only a few slides of his most famous buildings such as the Disney Concert Hall in LA, The Experience Museum Project in Seattle, the Guggenheim Bilboa and the unbuilt Peter B. Lewis residence were shown.  Peter Lewis and Frank Gehry each spent 15 minutes discussing some of the highlights of their lives and careers and then they took questions from the audience.

The Asian art collection at the Cleveland Museum of Art may be in storage, but this past Saturday, April 7th, Clevelanders had an exciting opportunity to learn about ancient and contemporary Chinese Art and a leading scholar's recent work in that area through the eighteenth annual Harvey Buchanan Lecture in Art History and the Humanities.

 

Claude Monet. Poplars, Pink Effect, 1891
36 7/8 x 29 1/8, Private Collection

Wednesday night I attended a lecture at the Cleveland Museum of Art, part of the Monet Lecture Series that accompanies the exhibition Monet in Normandy. So far I have attend all but the first in this eight lecture series. I found the previous lectures all to be very entertaining and enlightening. I feel I know a lot about Monet now -- I read the exhibition catalog and gallery labels and I have listened to the audio tour, but I am finding that Claude Monet is a truly fascinating figure and it seems there is always something more to learn about him. Paul Tucker is a  professor at the University of Massachusetts and a renowned scholar on Monet and Impressionist painting. His lecture was titled "Monet, Modernism, Normandy, and La France" -- a title I believe was meant to cover all the bases. What I found most interesting about Professor Tucker's hour long lecture was his insights on some of Monet's late works that become narrow and vertically oriented (such as Poplars, Pink Effect 1891) and the role of religion in Monet's life and work. 

There are not many opportunities to see African art in Cleveland -- especially while the Cleveland Museum of Art is under renovation. Fortunately, there are some generous collectors with outstanding African collections in Cleveland. Art: Trilogy, Anonymity, and Eclecticism, 100 pieces of African Art and African American Art is an exhibition going on now through May 15th 2007 at the Cleveland Public Library, Main Library Building, 2nd Floor Exhibit Corridor, which taps into the collectors' and creators' spirits.

The Church at Varengeville, Morning Effect is the most powerful work Monet created while on a painting campaign in Varengeville in 1882. The church of Saint-Valery is a Romanesque medieval church, built in the 12th-century, perched dramatically near the edge of  a towering cliff. It has long been a mariners' church and many generations of local fisherman are buried in the cemetery.

Art Courtesy of Jeff Buster

What is your visual and emotional impression of Cleveland and our Lake Erie shore?

A limited palette and an intimate, close up view of nature make this an arresting modern work. In January of 1885 Monet experienced weather something like what we had in Cleveland just two weeks ago. Temperatures in France that month were unusually cold, averaging around 21 degrees and snow altered the landscape close to Monet's home in Giverny. Winter scenes were popular among the Impressionists and Claude Monet had painted his first in 1865, very early in his career.

   

    Claude Monet's paintings are pretty. For this reason some people love his work and other dismiss it as decorative and superficial. "Monet in Normandy", the exhibition on now at the Cleveland Museum of Art, brings us over 50 works by one of the world's best known painters and presents them in an intellectual manner that may even make you see those water lily tote bags and umbrellas in a different light.

I am posting this in response to Jeff's insightful comments on that warm, colorful painting from SoCal. Your are right, few artists seem to paint the north and south poles.

I heard a fascinating, heartwarming and inspiring story on WCPN's Weekend America early this afternoon. It was about a fantastic sculptural building in Brooklyn called Broken Angel, the life's work of a unique romantic visionary, Arthur Woods. Outsider architecture might be a term used to describe his style. Woods is a self-trained architect and painter.