Happy Day, Mothers Everywhere --- Day 15/143

Walk: cold, windy TJ's 

Distance: 2.5 miles

Plus 🐟,🦊. ETC 

Here Comes the Sun, Part 4 --- Days 15/140 - 142

Walks: chilly, windy hood & Presidio

Distance: 4 miles average

So Pristine 😱

So Ciwt is standing at the doorway of her 'revised' sunroom and wrestling with the part of her that buys things and, instead of using or wearing them, lets them sit or hang often with price tags.  Why?  Well, that same part tells her things like "what if it gets scraped/dirty/stained/etc?."  Or in today's case, "now those  pristine cabinets will get messy, maybe scratched, definitely covered with cat litter.  They won't be perfect anymore."  In other words, some part of Ciwt is quite mad.  

But she remembers things like "the perfect is the enemy of the very good." And that all went well (mostly)  with the things she bought after she started actually using them or wearing them (or donating them).  So, she has the cat boxes and other things lined up just outside the sunroom.   Will she move them in? .... ❓...  Stay timed............................................

YES!!!!

Now Useful (if you look closely you can even see specks of litter on the floor)😸

Spring in the City --- Days 15/139, etc, etc

Walk: Hood

Distance: 4 miles

                    Common symptoms of mild allergies are:

• Runny nose

• Nasal congestion

• Sneezing

• Itchy eyes 

• Tiredness

• 
  

Here Comes the Sun, Part 3 --- Days 136-138

Walks: Cold Windy Hood

Distance Average: 3.5 miles

Waiting for cushion, more pillows and hammer and hook for painting.

The Etruscans, Who? --- Days 15/134 & 135

Walks: small Hood

Distances: 2 miles (back to cold and windy)

After decades of of steeping herself in art viewing and art history, Ciwt can usually file her first encounters with art works somewhere near other remembered works.  Not so with the Etruscan art in the Legion of Honor's current landmark exhibition, The Etruscans: From the Heart of Ancient Italy.*

It turns out Ciwt is not alone in being entirely new to the Etruscan civilization, art and culture.  Our history books and art museums have kept us well versed on the civilzations that surrounded Etruria - Phoenicia, Egypt, Greece, Rome - but virtually dismissed the brillliant civilization that once controlled almost the entire peninsula we now call Italy.

The Etruscans were the first Western Mediterraneum 'superpower,' and. along side the Greeks, developed the fisrt true cities of Europe.  If you look closely at the map above you'll see that Rome was just one of many present day Italian towns (Pisa, Florence, Siena) within BC Etruscan territory.  As Rome grew into the Roman Empire, much of its organizational, technical, religious and artistic strength rested on the teachings it absorbed from the Etruscans.  Roman numerals, the alphabet, aquaducts, intersecting networks of roads, advanced metalwork, temple and house engineering, tools, weapons, ceramic painting techniques, ritual banquets and gladiator contests, rights of inheritance, all these and more were invented or developed by the Etruscans.  Try to imagine the Italian Renaissance without those elements.

In view of this high level of culture and vast territory, Ciwt wondered how the Etruscans came to be essentially vanished from the history books.  Turns out there were two main factors at play: their city-state organization and the common language they shared.  Each city-state was so evolved and guarded, the territory as a whole did not develop a common militia and were ripe for conquest one by one.  The Etruscan language was common throughout its lands, however it was utterly unique and incomprehensible to outsiders.  As a result, all of its written culture and history disappeared as it was absorbed by Rome.

What remains of the Etruscans are the objects painted or placed in its tombs, which they considered intermediate resting places for the deceased until they went on the afterlife. And these tomb objects tell us much about the Etruscan people.  Many tombs are extremely opulent indicating that Etruscan trade of their natural resources - particularly gold, tin, silver and other metals - with other Mediterranean cultures made them staggeringly wealthy.  The treasures in a woman's tomb shown in the Legion of Honor exhibition is rife with luxury, one of a kind objects and tells us their women were held in high regard.  This is reinforced by paintings and sculptures which show women side by side in equal partnership with men.  The people in the art works are gentle, calm, happy (instead of the more bellicose and removed early Greek and Roman figures), and you get a sense that there was a long period of happy living and a joie de vivre mixed with some humor throughout much of the Etruscan peoples.

Or, this is what Ciwt thought. Below are just a few of the art objects that appealed to Ciwt along with her decidely unprofessional signacge. Hopefully you can get to the Legion and choose your own favorites in The Etruscans: From the  Heart of Ancient Italy exhibition. 

But first, a word about Renee Dreyfus.

Renee Dreyfus, George and Judy Marcus Distinguished Curator in Charge, Ancient Art.

Thirty years ago Renee Dreyfus began dreaming of removing the complex and fascinating Etruscan culture from the shadows of of the Greeks and Romans and giving it a proper introduction.  This was twenty years after she began her curatorship of Ancient Art at the Fine Arts Museums and, with many significant and rare acquisitions, grew a small, spotty collection into a highly regarded and active department.  During her tenure at the museum, Dreyfus has organized over 20 exhibitions exploring the ancient Mediterranean civilizations, including the 1979 Treasures of Tutankhamun, its 2009 sequel, Tutankhamun, Last Supper in Pompeii: From the Table to the Grave, Ramses the Great and the Gold of the Pharoahs among others.  These types of exhibitions require supreme connoisseurship and, often even more, delicate international diplomacy.  Only a curator in the highest regard would be trusted to bring objects from the Vatican and other highly guarded European museums to the United States for the first time.  One such treasure was hand carried from an Italian town by the mayor herself.  Such is Renee Dreyfus's respect and stature throughout the world of antiquity arts,

Tomb wall and ceiling painting

Etruscan, "Happy" Seal

Etruscan, Married Couple Tomb Figures, ceramic

Etruscan, Bronze Pot with Etching and Handle Doing Yoga Backbend

Velovis (Mercury), Etruscan, Viterbo, Monterazzano, 1st C AD, bronze

Youth with Horse, Etruscan, Bronze, 375-350 BC

Charming Etruscan Bronze Tomb Objects

Etruscan, Charming Banquet Waiter with Tray

Etruscan, Seated Boy, Bronze

Etruscan, Bowl with Deer Head Handles, @ 7th C BC, Bucchero, a distinctly black, burnished ceramic, fired with very little oxygen so that is black clear through.  often considered the signature ceramic fabric of the Etruscans. 

*The Etruscans: From the Heart of Ancient Italy.  San Francisco Museum of the Legion of Honor, May 2 - September 20, 2026

** https://www.famsf.org/exhibitions/etruscans-heart-ancient-italy

Before there was IMAX ... --- Days 15/130 - 133

Walk: Tuesday errands

Distance: 4 miles

Frederick Edwin Church, (1826-1900), Rainy Season in the Tropics, 1866, @4.7' x 7', oil on canvas,
FAM deYoung Museum, San Francisco

Ever wonder what people did for visual entertainment before movies?  The landscape painter, Frederick Edwin Church (1826-1900) had one answer.

The landscape artist Thomas Cole ( 1801-1848)  wrote of his pupil, Frederick Edwin Church, that Church had "..the finest eye for drawing in the world."  Since Cole was the founder of the renowned Hudson River School of landscape painting*, this was supreme praise.  Indeed Church deserved to be set apart even from the most talented landscape artists for his abundance of rare talents: a business mind, a world traveler's adventuring energy, a scientist's vision of nature and the empressario showmanship of a P.T. Barnum. 

By his mid-30's Church was the most famous American artist commercially and artistically.  Not by accident.  His sublime, heroic landscapes with technically accurate renderings of flora, fauna and atmospheric effects astounded audiences eager for visions of exotic, faraway landscapes.  Church's travels ranged from New York State, to the Arctic and the Andes where he would make preparatory sketches.  Returning to his studios on the Hudson River and 10th Avenue New York City, he built them up to a heady combination of religious awe, scientific inquisitiveness and lively fascination.  

Then, with a few of his largest and most spectacular canvases, such as Rainy Season in the Tropics above, he put on well advertised single painting exhibitions in New York and Europe.  Thousands of people would line up around the block and pay an entry fee to see the painting.  The huge work's frame would be propped on a stage floor draped in a curtain as the audience sat on benches sometimes using opera glasses to get a close view.  When the overhead light from the skylights was just right, Church dramatically pulled the curtain back to instant and well deserved astonishment and immediate sale.  

*An outgrowth of the Romantic movement, the Hudson River school was the first native school of painting in the United States; it was strongly nationalistic both in its proud celebration of the natural beauty of the American landscape and in the desire of its artists to become independent of European schools of painting.

Here Comes the Sun, Part 2 --- Day 15/129

Walk: Monday Errands

Distance: 3.5 miles 

Well, well, look what we have in Ciwt's sunroom now!  Such good carpentry work!  Ciwt's cats will be thrilled.   Stay tuned for progress....

Much! Nicer than Ciwt Expected!

Paint Drying

Catching Up with Art --- Days 15/121-128

Walks: Hood, Presidio, SF Ballet, Opera Plaza Cinema

Average: 4 miles

So, Ciwt was finally released from the pop up UPS and home contractor hub her condo has become and was able to walk to two first class productions.

San Francisco Ballet 'Mere Mortals'

As Ciwt readers can see above, SF Ballet's entirely original production Mere Mortals is not your (great) grandmother's classic ballet. It's an acquired taste for many.  Minor ballet maven Ciwt herself had to see it three times to appreciate it. The first time she was utterly repelled, the second a little more forgiving and this third time finally able to be stunningly appreciative of all aspects of the production.  

Starting with the dancing which is utterly nonstop and perfectly coordinated footfall by football, high leap by high leap, head nod by head nod often with the entire company on stage. Just extraordinary dancing. The (frightening) stark costumes are a perfect compliment to the dance 'plot' as well as the combination symphony/electronic music.  Unlike Ciwt's slow take, Mere Mortals was an immediate classic for the young, techie, AI-creating members of the audience.  So much so that the Ballet mounted an unscheduled repeat performance which was immediately sold out.  And so, in spite of 'grandmother' holdouts, art forms continue to evolve with the times.

Michaela Coel and Ian McKellen in The Christophers

But not all artists evolve as the great Ian McKellen demonstrates so perfectly in his role of a passe 80's bad boy artist who now hides out with his unfinished canvases in his two London townhouses.  He is everything Ciwt remembers from McKellen's Acting Shakespeare, a traveling  one-man show of Shakespearean monologues interspersed with theatrical anecdotes devised and performed by Ian McKellen in, yes, the 1980's.  Except he just might be even better in The Christophers.  

It must be quite a challenge to act with McKellen, and Michaela Coel was totally equal to it  Her steadfast  erudite presence is a perfect foil to McKellen's bombastic verbosity.  And the entire movie is full of humorous, witty truisms about the art world, being an artist, the price of art.  Ciwt only wishes she could have a copy of Ed Soloman's script for The Christophers so she could catch up with some of the clever King's English dialogue that flew by her..