"There is grandeur in this way of life" Charles Darwin

HAPPY BIRTHDAY HEATHER!! 30 TODAY!!

We ventured back to Balboa Park on Monday to take in some of the museums, but we didn’t arrive til late (have you ever tried to hurry a young woman when she’s trying to select an outfit? It was a compromise that Amy did her make-up on the way there!) so we went to the Spanish Village and the Museum of Natural History. The former is an artists’ quarter set on the outskirts of Balboa Park, featuring the work of 36 different artists, arranged into guilds, each with different specialities, including Sculpture, Painting, Photography, and Jewellery. It’s called the Spanish Village because of the Spanish architecture: brightly coloured floors, buildings the colour of cream left outside on a hot day and each individual studio had a differently coloured and decorated door. You can have a look for yourselves at http://www.spanishvillageart.com/ . Kate, you would have loved it. There was one shop that featured the work of several artists who specialise in making necklaces that are enamel on copper (I grabbed you a leaflet Kitty-Kat so that we could learn more about how it’s done), but rest assured that none of them were as good as the ones your Dad made. The pictures attached give you some idea of what the place looked like, and I couldn’t resist grabbing a picture of Dad in his new hat, which he and I love, but Amy says is humiliating. Yoots, huh!

The Village was built in 1935 for an International Exposition and modelled after a Spanish Village, designed to hold restaurants and shops. Artists took over when the Exposition ended, but the military took it during the Second World War and ruined it (which just goes to show what happens when you make war, not art, dude), leaving the poor artists to rebuild and mend it all in order to move back in 1948. The government then declared it a National Historic Landmark to ensure that no soldiers would ever return and spoil things by waving around their overly large weapons. True story.


The artists were lovely and really happy to talk about their work without pushing it down your throat. I fell in love with the work of a shy, middle-aged Chinese woman called Lucy Wang (check her out at http://www.lucywang.com)/, but I would have had to ship back the huge painting that I wanted most of all from her studio, so I contented myself with a bookmark and a card that I can frame when I get home. Amy and I were privileged to see the artistic temperament at work when two female sculptors got into a heated argument about the Sculptors’ Guild invoices, and we feigned enduring interest in a series of statues so that we could hear it play out until one of the women stormed off, muttering under her breath. We then scuttled away, giggling under ours.

One of the other sculptors showed us a huge statue of a lion, created from tumbled (I have no idea, I was too busy nodding knowledgeably to ask) Italian marble and cut stained glass. It weighs over 500 lbs and is 4 ½ feet tall and over 7 feet long – we couldn’t get it in the suitcase (or use Amy as surety for a loan, the artist refused), so we were reluctantly forced to leave him there. His name, interestingly was Leeuw (pronounced Leo, I love language) van Vlaanderen, which we were told by the sculptor is Dutch for ‘The Lion of Flanders’. I was impressed and told her it was Ah-sum, but she looked at me blankly for a moment and then pretended to see someone she knew on the other side of the gallery (some people just can’t take praise – it’s an artist thing, I think).

I picked up a few artists’ statements because I’m hoping that Wise Words (my writing business, catering to your every creative and personal writing need – contact me direct on sarah@wisewordswebsite.com for more details of my incredibly reasonable rates) can pick up some trade writing these for local artists when I get back home. As far as I can see, to write these statements is a hard line to tread between telling people the underlying ethos of your work and sounding like a pretentious twat. Not all of the artists got there, but then they didn’t have me to support them, so, in the words of Judy Garland, they (name this tune for your daily bonus point) ‘have to muddle through somehow.’

Next, after I’d spent some time in the courtyard dreaming about Lisa (no Clark!) and I setting up studio here in Spanish Village, we went to grab some lunch at a small café, where we shared a table with a lovely woman called Catherine from Denver, Colorado. How do I know this? Well, you all know how I always hate to generalise, but there is one thing that runs through all of the places we’ve stayed so far – Americans are bloody friendly. To a suspicious city-girl like me (insight into my thoughts when someone I don’t know talks to me: What do you want? What are you selling? Are you going to harm, maim or kill me? I’m not even sure what maiming is, but I know I’m bloody scared of it), this can be quite disarming at first, but I am getting used to it, and I have to admit, it often gives one an enormous sense of wellbeing. It also made me re-think some of my nasty stereotypes about the Americans, which, as I have found so many times before with other nations (I’m thinking of the Chinese in relation to Tibet, for example), actually really apply to their government and not the people. I don’t know why I do this so frequently because I would never want anyone to judge me based on the actions of Tony Blair.

Anyhoo, Catherine was in San Diego taking in some of the sights of the park while her boyfriend prepared for a boat race on a 13 foot something or other (yes, that’s the technical term). She, like me, also disliked LA intensely, though, as she told me with a wry smile, she had lived there for 5 years nonetheless (though perhaps this is why she disliked it, but it didn’t take me 5 minutes to know that it was not my kind of town). Catherine said that it was unbelievable how different the feel of San Diego is in comparison, it’s so laid back and friendly. Before she left us to tuck into our food, she commented on my beautiful necklace, which is one that Kate’s Dad made years ago (myspace website to follow, where they and other pieces of Kate’s future artwork will be on sale). I could happily live in Balboa Park and was desperately sorry that we didn’t get more time there. There was an exhibition on photography by San Diego young people that I really wanted to see in the Museum of Photography, but we ran out of time. It would be great if we could run a similar exhibition in Portsmouth one day (wistful sigh, plans for proposal submissions when I get back to work already hatching).

Next, we went to the Natural History Museum, which was a real education. Apart from a huge model of a Great White Shark suspended in the main hall, which terrorised my sister (whose fear of sharks matches mine of heights and cable cars), this was such a pleasant surprise to us all. The exhibitions are predominantly about palaeontology, geology and local wildlife (there was a horrid little scorpion in a tank that I could have done without seeing), which I didn’t think I was interested in, but it just goes to show the power of good interpretation (see previous contact details for my business, Wise Words if you’re a museum or exhibition in need – availability for rest of 2006 limited, can negotiate for 2007, book now as I’m in demand – this girls’ hot!).



I won’t bore you with too much of what I learned (actually I will, but if I told you that straight up you wouldn’t carry on reading, and you’ll ignore this because you think I’m joking – the classic NLP double-bluff, Steve Hender, I have a lot to thank you for). The first display that really grabbed my attention was about the history of palaeontology itself. In 1796, George Cuvier puzzled over the bones of a mystery animal, which looked like a cross between a sloth, a lion, and a bear – sounds like a bad children’s joke somewhat, what do you get, a lazy liar – which turned out to be a giant groundsloth. He named it the Megatherium, which means huge beast (now, I don’t mean to turn this into one long plug - well I do but, etc etc – but he could have done with speaking to an experienced creative consultant like Wise Words), and in time he came to realise that this creature was not alive anywhere on Earth. It was extinct and this was a new concept in science.


Isn’t that amazing? (Is anyone still reading, or did I lose you all at palaeontology?) That the idea of extinct didn’t exist, and yet now you can’t sneeze without a species disappearing (I’m not suggesting the two are linked – correlation is not causation). I bought an amazing book at the museum called Tales of A Shaman’s Apprentice by Mark Plotkin, who is an ethnobotanist (studies the use of plants in tribal cultures) who informed me that in 2000 over ten percent of the world’s plant species alone were estimated to have become extinct, so it’s not just an issue for zoos and marine worlds. Moreover, since the turn of the 20th century over 90 tribes in Brazil have become extinct (mostly directly or indirectly through contact with the West). I also found out that here in San Diego, the housing developments that I wrote to you about in my previous post have made San Diego one of the most threatened natural habitats in the world, so I was wrong about the land still winning the battle. They have had to institute something called the San Diego Multiple Species Conservation Program to try to halt the damage they’ve already started. This is a multi-agency initiative that sees government, conservation and urban development agencies working together (in theory at least, I suspect it may always be more complicated where money is involved) to protect the natural habitats from man. Just read that last clause again, because I find it so tragic. Greenpeace and FoE, you’re getting some of my (highly insubstantial) pay packet when I get home.

Last, we saw a Foucault’s Pendulum that had been gifted to the museum by some wealthy hobnob or other. Now I seriously will give a prize to anyone who can explain to me what this is. They fascinate me and yet I don’t know how the hell they work. A bit like my relationship to men, really.