An Impromptu Artist’s Date

Yesterday morning I had to go out to run some errands - it was a beautiful day - sunny, spring-time warm and, for the first time in what felt like forever, the thought of having a little walk about was appealing.

After finishing up what I had to get done, I parked the car on Murray Street in the Byward Market area and walked over to the National Art Gallery…

This is a shot of the Beaux-Arts lane that I took a few years ago…one of my first ‘drive by’ shots taken out of the car window while I was driving past…















Here is a shot of the same lane from yesterday…















I can’t remember the exact day last fall, but at some point, while driving across the Alexandra Bridge into Ottawa, I noticed this sharp silver finger reaching up into the sky…I asked Cariño if he knew when it had appeared and what it was, but he didn’t know either…and that was how it remained until yesterday.

I walked past Louise Bourgeois’ Maman…the giant spider, and although I really dislike spiders, this one kind of grows on you. She is quite lovely. I believe there are 8 of these huge spider sculptures around the world.

Maman is one of many things that I keep returning to to try to get just the perfect shot…I’m not the only one, either…on any given day you can see someone or sometimes groups of people walking up to, away from and all around Maman trying to get their perfect shot.

I am happy with this one I took yesterday, but I am sure that it won’t be the last one I take of her!










As I walked around to the river-side of the gallery, I started to get a feel of just how tall this new sculpture was…and such a nice shiny silver.















I walked right up to it and all around it…I decided that I like it! I especially liked being right bellied up to it…




















































There was no plaque or anything telling me what the name of the sculpture was, who the artist was…when it had been installed…so I looked it up when I got home and my artist date became complete then – I had got out, seen something up close that I hadn’t seen before, had fun figuring out how to take some photos of what I saw…and then was inspired to come home and research about what I had seen…and, finally, to blog about it! That whole package goes a long way to making me feel good!

The new sculpture’s name is “One Hundred Foot Line”, was created by the New York artist Roxy Paine and is one in a series of trees that he has done in stainless steel called “Dendroids”. There are 4 interesting videos about the artist and his work. The first one that comes up when you go to this page is a talk with the artist about his stainless steel trees and rock sculptures. I’ll let you go listen to it instead of my paraphrasing what he is trying to portray. The other 3 videos (click on the little arrow at the bottom right of the video to get to them) show the process he uses in his ‘paintings’ – really kind of neat – he has an elaborate computerized set-up that then allows the paint to do what it will do.

There are some more videos that show the installation of his mammoth Dendroids – the first in the list shows a time-lapse video of the installation of One Hundred Foot Line.

After getting to know the new sculpture, I continued walking around this area called Nepean Point. This article from the Ottawa Citizen talks about both the new sculpture and Nepean Point.

I continued taking some shots…it was a good a good artist's date!















































To top the day off I played with Lily - who was 6 months old a few days ago...I can't believe how fast the time flies!!!