Don't miss the Sam Francis show on October 11, Pasadena Art Night

Yes.  It's that time of year again.  Pasadena Art Night 2013 is on October 11 and admission to 18 art and culture venues will be free from 6 to 10 p.m.

New this year: eleven food trucks, stationed near various museums, will be donating 10% of their proceeds to support future ArtNight events.

Now, as the headline for this post indicates the Sam Francis retrospective at the Pasadena Museum of California Art (PMCA) should be at the top of your must-see list.  The 114 paintings in the show cover his amazing career from start to finish.  You will see the first work he did, a watercolor painted while he was flat on his stomach--for months--recovering from illness. Then decade after decade of his work unfolds on the museum walls, his assurance growing, his colors more vibrant. 

As always, a free shuttle service will take you from location to location, but unless you start promptly at 6 p.m. you may find it difficult to take in all the exhibitions.  There is almost too much good stuff!

I have another blog that may interest you: L.A. City Pix.  Visit it now.

What? Another Farmers Market? Well, this one has paella for sale

Cooking up paella at the Old Town
Farmers Market in Pasadena

Yep.  There is yet another Farmers Market.  It opened last Sunday on Holly Street between Fair Oaks and Raymond in Old Town Pasadena.  The vendors were selling all the usual stuff.  The greens, such as lettuce, looked very left over.  They were probably picked--or picked up--on Friday.  The stone fruits were okay as were the root vegetables.

I went to the market because I wanted to have a tamale for breakfast.  Unfortunately, there were no tables and I don't like to eat standing up, so no tamale for me.  And I doubt that they will be adding tables because a couple of the restaurants along Holly street were open for breakfast/brunch and they don't want the competition.

But then there was the group making and selling paella!  What a concept, paella for breakfast!

Oh, starting this Sunday, August 25th, Lula Mae, my favorite gift store at the corner of Fair Oaks and Holly, will be open during Market hours. 

One more thing:  I have a new blog, L.A. City Pix.  Take a look at it.

Scene Painting at PMCA - a must see!

During the Great Depression of the 1930s and on through the '40s and '50s, there was a flowering of watercolor painting in California.  Until that era, watercolor was a medium that generally was used to color prints or make studies for "real" paintings--paintings in oil. 

In this large exhibition at the Pasadena Museum of California Art you can see the results of artists who began to take watercolor seriously.  The works shown, however, are not only watercolor; in fact, most of the exhibition is oils, with a small side gallery devoted to prints and pencil drawings from the 1930 to 1960.

Happily, the curator has attempted to identify the specific locale of each painting.  It is breathtaking to see what California looked like then.  In many works the California image is still rural, still pastoral.  But the urban scene of that era is also represented in paintings of downtown Los Angeles including Bunker Hill when it was still home to old, rickety Victorian houses. Newport Beach appears less cluttered, more carefree.  But Sunset Blvd. near downtown looks like it could be a New York immigrant slum in one painting or, in a work by another artist, a Disney-ish happy land.

While most of the works are landscapes or cityscapes, one gallery is devoted to paintings of people involved in daily activities during that era. Again, there is a sense of great change.

Go see this exhibition.  It runs through July 28th, Wednesdays through Sundays only.

You can reach the Pasadena Museum of California Art in the Gold Line.  Get off at the Memorial Park Station and walk east.

Sex, Rock n'n Roll in the '60s

Finally, a writer has come up with an anti-Christian Grey as the hero in a new romance novel, "San Francisco Summer '69 ".  His name is Austen and he is loving, exhuberant, curious, smart, very sexy and--oh, did I mention, the lyricist and guitar player for a rock 'n' roll band.  And I'll bet you dollars to donuts that Austen never flogged, beat or punished his girlfriends; that kind of behavior is so 2011.  He has always been too busy doing something else with them.

While Austen is the hero of "San Francisco Summer '69 ", the story is told through the eyes of Julia, a young woman who has moved to San Francisco from Seattle and has other things on her mind than the blue-eyed rock musician.  Things like finding a place to live and getting a job--which she does at a start-up alternative weekly newspaper.  It doesn't take him long, however, to come up with a clever way to lure her to his bed.

Then there is sex.  By Chapter 8 things are getting steamy.  By Chapter 9 it will melt your socks off again and again.

True confession:  normally I read spy novels, not romance novels, but this one was worth reading, especially as an antidote to everything Grey these days.  I mean really, Oprah is doing an expose of BDSM??!!  Talk about proof that the Grey frenzy is dead!

You can find San Francisco Summer '69 By Annie Carroll on Kindle.  It's fun!