@toedrifter
California landscape architect. Drawing and planting trees while the world burns. Undercover optimist.
During a layover on my way to Europe I checked out Piet Oudolf's lovely new meadow garden at the Calder museum in Philadelphia. The bees were liking it as much as I was.
I sometimes overlook the age and longevity of plants that aren't trees. These Prickly Pears are grown from pads on plants that were originally planted around 1850. Gleaned from that historic adobe and planted at this one. The flowers are California native Beach Daisy.
The Ruth Osawa wall piece with cactus and agave in the foreground at the Oakland Museum of California is one of my favorite pairings of sculpture and planting in any museum. Osawa was great and someone found this one a perfect home.
This time of year my veggie garden becomes more of a flower garden. Sweet peas to make my house smell good, Love in a Mist for the seeds I roast with potatoes, Cal Poppies because they are awesome. There are greens and I'm waiting on my favas, but right now is a fun time for flowers.
Watercolor of an Erythronium, Trout Lily. I lose track which specific Erythronium I'm looking at or in this case painting, I think theyvary a bit and hybridize. Whichever one I'm looking at, they're always beautiful in flower.
South Africa section in the UC Berkeley botanic garden in March is one of my favorite plantings in the world. Babiana (Baboon Flower) and boulders.
I'm still cleansing brain and timeline with California native wildflowers. This one is Matillija Poppy, aka Fried Egg Flower, Romneya coulteri.
After too much reading about the Epstein cesspool, I'm cleansing with more wildflowers. There are actually some malevolent plants in the world but most are lovely beings. This one is a California native in the Phlox family, Gilia tricolor.
Another wildflower watercolor, loosely based on Clarkia and a Deer Grass bundle
I sent the morning painting wildflowers. This one is a California native Globe Lily, Calochortus albus.
For a couple months each year the Berkeley shoreline, with the sun setting behind the Golden Gate Bridge, is one of the best places in the world to watch the sunset. I will always love this view.
Happy Bodhi Day, today commemorates the enlightenment of the Buddha. I painted this in Boras, Sweden. It's a sculpture titled Bodhi by Fredrick Wretman, a bronze bust of a man gazing inward while he sits or stands in the river that flows through the town.
Congress' next discharge petition should be to release the presidents medical records.
I started a portrait of my father, realized I didn't want to amber this liverspotted, slack mouth version of him, so I bailed into a loose version of a Canova sketch model. A few days years back it was COVID, but if I had to describe this era of politics with a single word I would say dementia.
The natural follow up to The Thinker is Camille Claudel's Leaning Man. She should have been the next in the line of great French Romantic sculptors but never quite hit that level, one of art's biggest gender tragedies. Though, poetic justice, the Claudel room is the best part of the Musee Rodin.
A while back I posted a watercolor of Carpeaux's Ugolino. It felt inevitable to follow that with Rodin's The Thinker which it heavily influenced. I'm over Rodin for a variety of reasons but when you sit with The Thinker for a while, you really do mind meld with it in a deep way.
TFG which means this f'ing garden. I love my veggie garden and I love the redwood tree, but the tallest tree in the world near my veggie garden means I french double dig every time I plant. Kohlrabi and broccolini going in, and I'll get another month of sungolds from the other bed, so...
I had planned to hike from Muir Woods today but it was closed due to the shutdown. Thanks Trump. Hiked in the state park instead, the lovely steep ravine trail. Thanks California.
I don't know how many people have painted a portrait of their father as a child, but I recommend it
Trying to maintain that feeling of riding a bicycle through Scandinavia.
I'm glad I routed my bike trip thru the Great Bog National Park and the Vandalorum museum with this beautiful new meadow by Piet Oudolf. The bog and the meadow hit as hard as the fjords.