Yesterday a.m.: a morning for growing ant strength and carrying my desk into an open field. In June it can be physically painful to be stuck inside.Since desk wouldn't balance on head, I went to an art gallery. You can pretend to be outside in drawings by Robert C. Schick, but you're an arts editor doing work. Schick is a Midpeninsula lifer with pen-and-ink visions of both landscapes that remain and those that have been plowed under.
Farms and orchards recall life before strip malls, while houses with luxurious porches hark back to times with a lot less street traffic, when people actually talked to their neighbors just outside the front door.
Some watercolor, too, which has a wispy nostalgia but lacks the precision of the drawings. The black-and-white gives the ink landscapes a confidence -- and patience -- that you need if you're going to fight in City Hall. (Schick is a veteran of anti-development wars.)
Eventually I had to go back to the office, but for a while it was good to feel like a kid with the entire day and yard ahead of me, when a hillock of soft grass under a spreading oak was the whole world.
BTW, Schick will be at an opening reception at the gallery, Mohr Gallery at CSMA, this Friday evening from 6 to 8.
BBTW, after I wrote this I found a terrific Judith H. Dobrzynski post on ArtsJournal about cell phones in art galleries. Yep, a Fall Out Boy ringtone would've dropped a giant ant on my dreamy gallery mood. Tell me again why cell-phone dampeners are illegal here?
Pictured: "Proposed Mountain View Heritage Park for the Cuesta Annex," a 2006 watercolor by Robert Schick.
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