Last Thursday we headed to SF via Berkeley to capture and examine the public murals at Coit Tower and the Chalet Beach house on the great highway beside the beach.
We took off a little later than we planned but arrived in Berkley around 2 pm. A storm was headed into the area and it looked like the valley was going to get more rain than the Bay Area. It had not rained in the valley for four months. This is typical of the Mediterranean climate type that we have in the valley.
We had a lunch/snack at the Cheeseboard in Berkeley. Its a unique sort of pizza place. We had with us, David, Pronounced...... Da ......Veed. Linzi and Sean's friend from Madrid, Spain. He was sure that he didn't want pizza again. In fact what he really wanted was pasta. No pasta is available at this spot. They only make pizza and one pizza type her day. So the call is... do you want a whole one, a half one or by the piece. They have great salads too. We bought one of them as well.
The pizza for the day was gorgonzola, pear, and walnut pizza. We ordered a half a pizza for 10 bucks and say down and enjoyed the live music that comes with the ambiance. The quartet was singing jazz/ pop combinations with a little blues.. The drummer, keyboard and bass player snapped out some nice back up to a diminutive a female black singer who was choosing the songs. The sky was dizzly but no rain.
We gathered up the clan and headed over to the city to do coit tower. Sean was still at work and would join us later for dinner.
We found a handicapped spot at Coit tower and the wheelchair entrance. There were just a few tourists there dropped off by their bus. We looked at the frescos and I snapped a bunch of good photos. My intent was to get some idea as to how the people are represented in these murals. I am doing some crowd depiction in my watercolor pursuit. I was particularly interested in how the transitions occur from hair to background on the people depicted.
The Coit tower murals and the Chalet Beach House murals represent life of the working people of the depression/post depression era in the San Francisco area. They were commissioned as part of the WPA. This government stimulus helped keep artists alive by doing pubic works.
While we were their we picked up Heather at her new office area, and she joined our group. With a tourist with us,David, from Madrid, we had to do Lombard street, the so called crookedest street in the city. A drive through Golden Gate Park was on the agenda too. Linzi wanted David to see the buffalo herd. I wanted to get some background shots of the Japanese Tea Garden. I had done a sketch book redenering of a group of girls dressed in purple dresses. I missed the details on the gate and the prospective of the steps leading up the the gate. The tea garden was closed on this day as we were kind of late getting there. There were a ton of chair set up in front of the Tea Garden looking like a wedding No people were in the chairs.
We headed back down through the park to eat at Tom Kiang. Tom Kiang is our favorite Dim Sum place. The food is impeccably the right temperature when it is served. The room has table cloths and it is considerably upscale to most restaurants in this genre.
Sean was to pack and meet us there as the younger crowd was headed to San Jose for a big magic tournament. Sean got misdirected on the way from Berkeley to San Francisco. That is pretty easy to do as San Francisco is not an easy city to navigate in a car. He made it and we all had a great meal.
Our overnight was in Milbrae. Its a city on the peninsula, not far from where I grew up. This allowed for us to go take some reference photos of the places that I grew up and went to school.
We then headed south and had a nice chat with my mom and dad that live in Morgan Hill.
It was almost dark when we arrived home. What a nice trip.
Along the way I listened to the San Francisco Giants win their way into the National League Championship Series.
:) Pat
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