Birch Aquarium & The Gliderport

With half of our family in tow (visiting from NorCal), we spent the morning with Great Grandma, dined at our favorite Encinitas hot spot- The Fish Shop, and then headed back to La Jolla for fish and flying fun!

For those new to this La Jolla treasure, Birch Aquarium at Scripps is the public exploration center for the world-renowned Scripps Institution of Oceanography at University of California San Diego. It is also the perfect size for little ones not to get overwhelmed in. With 60 habitats of fishes and invertebrates from the cold waters of the Pacific Northwest to the tropical waters of Mexico and beyond, adults are entertained as well.
My favorite species, here, are the Brainless Wonders... the jellyfish.
I could gaze at them, mesmerized, for hours.



Though the seahorse is pretty special, too. About 36 species of seahorses are currently known. They range in size from just over one-half inch to 12 inches long. Most seahorse species are between three and six inches long as adults. Seahorses propel themselves by using a small fin on their back that flutters up to 35 times per second. Even smaller pectoral fins located near the back of the head are used for steering.
The biggest news in the history of Birch Aquarium is little … Little Blue Penguins, that is! This recent exhibit follows the world’s smallest penguins on their journey from hatchlings to adults, highlighting the challenges they face in a changing climate while celebrating the features that make Little Blues so unique and adorable.
What fun to be there for a feeding.

We ended our visit at the Tidepool Plaza. "Get hands-on with our living tide pools. Get up close and personal with sea stars, sea anemones, hermit crabs, sea cucumbers, lobsters, and other organisms that call the the rocky intertidal zone home. Tide Pool Plaza is also the location of some of the most spectacular ocean views in San Diego. Overlooking La Jolla and the Pacific Ocean, this stunning outdoor plaza is a great place for guests to enjoy the coastal breeze and take in panoramic ocean views."

Last stop was at the Torrey Pines Gliderport to ogle death defying feats (that's how I view it).


Some questions just do not need to be answered! Fun, fun, day.

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Springtime at the Safari Park...

There really isn't much to say about our day. We embraced Spring and thoroughly delighted in all the San Diego Zoo Safari Park had to offer.

























"Life is fun and we have the photos to prove it!"

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Laguna Art Museum...

If you don't know, Laguna Beach is a special place for Steve and me. Our first date took place there, followed by our wedding a year and a half later. While not the easiest place to return to, from Temecula, we try to visit this memorable seaside town as often as possible.

Laguna's history is one created by artistic souls. By the late 1800s, visitors were making an annual pilgrimage through the canyons to camp at Laguna Beach each summer. By the time painter Norman St. Clair visited from San Francisco in 1903, Laguna Beach already had become a popular tourist destination for artists with a hotel: the Hotel Laguna (where we spent our wedding night).

Like tourists of any era, St. Clair returned home with glowing reports and landscape paintings that led his artist friends to follow him south. It wasn't long before Plein Air artists like William Wendt and California marine artist Frank Cuprien moved to Laguna Beach. Within a few years, Laguna Beach had a permanent population of about 300 people -- half of whom were artists.

In 1918, artist Edgar Payne opened an art gallery that later became the Laguna Art Museum, one of the first art museums in the state.

This is an incredible model of Mr. Payne's gallery. Within are actual works of art, by local talent.

"Laguna Art Museum exists to engage and enlighten people of all ages through art that embodies and preserves the California experience. It presents exhibitions relevant to California art and artists throughout the year and is home to the annual Art & Nature Festival celebrating the museum's unique relationship to the environment. The collection was initially shaped by donations of artworks by the artists who had flocked to Laguna Beach at the turn of the 20th century."
We chose to tour the museum by viewing the works that were newest to oldest. We began with Outlook/Insight: The LCAD Effect, an exhibition which presents a sampling of the artwork by the 2023 Master of Fine Art graduates from Laguna College of Art and Design (LCAD). "Outlook/Insight implies that the mindful engagement with the outer visible world builds personal insights. These artists skillfully express, not only how things look, but also what they can make you feel. Both the rational and the poetic are made apparent to the viewer who takes time to observe and reflect."

Rupy Kaloti's Aag Lagni (above) translates to catch fire, to raise fire, to burn, to become costly, to feel intense hunger, to writhe, or to be incensed. It was the nickname her grandmother gave her when she was a child. Because she was raised in two different cultures, social norms were something she contended with, and the nickname was fitting. Rupy's work explores her connection to two vastly different countries, India and America, while she attempts to reconcile opposing cultural ideologies. Fire Raiser is about Rupy's acceptance of the past, her connection to her ancestry, and her hope for the future.

In Freefall, by Jacquelin Nagel, the artist explores the relationship between drawing, painting, and photography to present a surreal world based in skillful representation of photo-based figurative works. She often uses a collage like approach and taps into her background as a florist to help piece together her own surreal world. Relying on her intuition as her guiding force, she creates large figurative oil paintings that strive to capture the simultaneous beauty and pain of growth. Here she explores the uncontrollable nature of life and the immense personal growth that comes in accepting that life is just one giant freefall.
Chapman Hamborg's artworks focus on family-from intimate moments we savor to hardships. Chapman captures vulnerable interactions between his wife and children that people worldwide experience in their own way-related to birth, breastfeeding, fatherhood, and motherhood. His goal is to encourage viewers to reflect on their family relationships and connections.
I really liked both of these pieces by Japanese born Sumire Kudo. Her meticulous paintings explore subconscious dynamics that shape society. People's values are dependent on the environment to which they belong. One community may hold beliefs that feel like "common sense," but those same beliefs often seem odd elsewhere. Her paintings reveal that destiny is controlled by socially imposed factors. Sumire Kudo hopes people can believe in themselves even if their beliefs differ from the norm.

Next genre: Contemporary Art. Judith Vida-Spence and Stuart Spence took interest in Laguna Art Museum, and together became benefactors of cutting-edge Southern California art for decades as well as Laguna Art Museum trustees. For more than thirty years, the Spences formed personal relationships with the contemporary art they lived with in their home in Los Angeles while also lending pieces to exhibitions and making significant donations to art museums—most notably LAM.

Judy and Stuart Spence’s history of giving to Laguna Art Museum now constitutes a significant 119 artworks by California artists and has become an important part of the museum’s collection. These gifts span California Conceptualism, West Coast Pop and Los Angeles’s Lowbrow art movement with works from the 1970s to the present.

Mark Heresy's Flag Series: American Landscape (1987), created with broken glass, denim, human hair, cigarettes, and wood, was one of those pieces you just had to look at closely. Wild.

Old Dead Men and Dead Fish (1990) by Chris Wilder, silkscreen on canvas (four pieces).
North Swell (Washington Crossing the Delaware) 1990 by Sandow Birk.
Encounter (2009) by Deborah Aschheim made me sad that I never went to The Encounter before it closed in 2013.  The story of the LAX Theme Building begins in 1959, where architecture firm Pereira + Luckman dreamt of creating a dramatic glass dome in the middle of the Los Angeles International Airport. The dome would connect the airport’s terminals and parking structures, and would truly be the hub of LAX.
However, this project was eventually scaled down and redesigned to become the futuristic flying saucer it is today. The Theme Building was built in 1961, and became a quintessential example of the Googie architectural style, which was influenced by the Space Age and is full of automotive and futuristic motifs. I hope one day it opens again and I'll get to see it in all its Googie grandeur!
What can one say about Elizabeth Pulsinelli's Stacked, c. 1990?
Or John Baldessari's I will not make any more boring art, c. 1971?

What we actually traveled to Laguna to see was Unseen Ties: The Visual Collection of Sherman Library & Gardens (a place we've never been but hope to some day soon). "A special partnership between Sherman Library & Gardens and Laguna Art Museum brings the legendary collection out of the library for the first time. Each artwork in Sherman Library’s fine art collection is an opportunity to make connections between past and present, tell a tale of local lore and notoriety and see the ties that weave California’s coastal and artistic communities together."
The visionary behind this local treasure was businessman Arnold D. Haskell, who opened the gardens to the public in 1966 and named them in honor of his mentor and prominent entrepreneur Moses Hazeltine Sherman. The library was initially established to house Sherman's papers and has become an invaluable resource of Southern California history. The library's impressive collection of maps, photographs and fine art provide a visual understanding of the people, places and activities of this region's changing geography. The fine art collection began in 1969. Over the years, the collection expanded when patrons and artists donated artwork to hang in the library, café and throughout the gardens. Sherman's fine art holdings are now prized for their historical, cultural and environmental significance.

The painting above, by Arthur Cahill, is of Moses H. Sherman (1853-1932), an educator and entrepreneur born in rural Vermont. In 1874, he headed west to Arizona to teach school. He evolved from educator to businessman by successfully investing in Arizona railways, mining, cattle and real estate. Sherman moved to Los Angeles in 1890, where he formed the first downtown electric street railway, which he later sold to Henry Huntington. He was involved in the development of the southern half of the San Fernando Valley, Hollywood and parts of Culver City, Del Rey, Imperial Valley and the Tejon Ranch.

Old Laguna (1931) is by William Alexander Griffith (1866-1940). Griffith taught art at St. Louis School of Fine Arts, the Académie Julian in Paris, and at Kansas University, where he was chair of the art department for 21 years. When he made his first trek to Laguna Beach, he fell in love with the landscape and made the burgeoning art colony his permanent residence. He served as president of the Laguna Beach Art Association in the 1920s.
These sculptures are by Lou Rankin. Born in 1929, Rankin was known by the 1960s for his innovative use of concrete to sculpt whimsical animals. Originally trained to be a cartoonist, Rankin attended the University of California, Berkeley before serving in the Armed Forces during the Korean War. Upon his return, he attended UCLA where he took a sculpture class that inspired him to make birds made from nails. Since 1970, many of his pieces reside at the Sherman Library & Gardens.


Part of what I love about galleries is learning about the artist's life story. Emil Kosa, Jr. (1903-1968) was born in Paris and studied at the Academy of Fine Arts, Prague; Ecolé des Beaux-Arts; and the Chouinard Art Institute. In his late teens, he showed talent for both music and the visual arts. Painting won out, and by the 1920s he moved to California but maintained his connections in France to further his art education. He studied with Jean-Pierre Laurens and Frank Kupta and was a good friend of Millard Sheets. In 1928, he worked with his father as a decorative artist doing murals for churches and auditoriums and took portrait commissions. Kosa is primarily known as a California Style watercolorist, and he was an active member in the California Watercolor Society. In 1933, he joined the newly formed special effects department at 20th Century Fox as a scene painter, and was quickly promoted to art director, a position he held for 35 years. In this role, he helped create the first logo for 20th Century Pictures (which later became 20th Century Fox) and was the first person to win the Academy Award for Best Visual Effects for his work on Cleopatra (1963).
This self portrait by William S. Darling (1882-1963) introduced us to the Hungary born artist who studied at the Royal Academy of Art in Budapest and the Ecolé des Beaux-Arts in Paris. He immigrated to New York in 1910 and pursued a career as a portrait artist and scene painter. In 1920, he moved to Southern California to work in the film industry and soon became the art department head for 20th Century Fox. He won three Academy Awards for Cavalcade (1933); The Song of Bernadette (1943); and Anna and The King of Siam (1946). In the 1950s, he became a well-known figure in the Laguna Beach and Palm Springs art communities where he painted coastal and desert landscapes.

I'm also a fan of tiles. Pictured is Phil Dike's Spearfisher Women (Corona del Mar, 1954). What an interesting guy Mr. Dike. Born in Redlands (1906-1990), he studied at all the best art schools in LA, NY and France. After returning to California in 1929, he began teaching at the Chouinard Art Institute and was one of the first artists to develop what became known as the California Style of watercolor painting.

In the early 1930s, he continued teaching and painting and took further studies in Paris. His watercolors were being exhibited in museum shows throughout America and he was receiving wide acclaim and numerous awards. By 1935, he was also working at the Walt Disney Studios where he taught art and color theory while working on animated films. Among the many classic films he worked on were Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Fantasia and The Three Caballeros (there is ALWAYS a Disney connection).  There is so much more to know about this talented man.

I also have a thing for hand-painted ceramics and appreciated Kay Finch's Band Wagon, 1943. Finch (1903-1993) studied at the Memphis Academy of Fine Arts in the 1920s. In 1929, she moved with her husband Braden Finch to California, and in 1939 they built a ceramics studio, Kay Finch Ceramics, in Corona del Mar. She created whimsical figurines glazed in pastel colors. She used a meticulous, multi-step process, which included multiple firings and hand decorating. She was best known for her animal figurines.
The outbreak of World War II, and the ban of imported goods to the United States, created high demand for Kay Finch's ceramics. By the end of World War II, Kay Finch Ceramics employed more than 60 people, many of whom were wives of servicemen. In addition to her retail space at the studio, Finch sold work through Marshall Field's & Company, Neiman Marcus, and Saks Fifth Avenue. Finch closed the studio in 1963 after the death of her husband. Band Wagon depicts all the ceramic studio employees at the time.
We ended our visit by ogling a selection of images from Sherman Library's vast holdings of vintage photographs depicting Laguna Beach, Newport Beach, Balboa Island, and Corona del Mar. What a slice of what life was like before us, in some of our most favorites places.
Each artwork in Sherman Library's fine art collection is an opportunity to make connections between past and present, tell a tale of local lore and notoriety and see the ties that weave California's coastal and artistic communities together. What an opportunity for us to return to a place so full of our personal history and that of the artists who came before us.

“The object of art is not to reproduce reality, but to create a reality of the same intensity.” — Alberto Giacometti

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