{"id":17129,"date":"2015-03-29T12:05:00","date_gmt":"2015-03-29T19:05:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/forallevents.com\/reviews\/?p=17129"},"modified":"2015-03-29T12:05:18","modified_gmt":"2015-03-29T19:05:18","slug":"public-art-in-marin-county-can-be-fun-to-see-or-climb-on","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/forallevents.com\/reviews\/public-art-in-marin-county-can-be-fun-to-see-or-climb-on\/","title":{"rendered":"Public art in Marin County can be fun to see \u2014 or climb on"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Writer\u2019s granddaughter bear-hugs Bufano bear in front of Ross Town Hall. Photo by Woody Weingarten.<\/p>\n

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Charming, playful mural adorns outer wall of Bolinas Avenue store in Fairfax. Photo by Woody Weingarten.<\/p>\n
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Colorful obelisk adorns Ross Valley Fire Department in downtown San Anselmo. Photo by Woody Weingarten.<\/p><\/div>\n<\/dd>\n<\/dl>\n<\/div>\n<\/dd>\n<\/dl>\n<\/div>\n

\u201cPublic art,\u201d country music singer and visual artist Terry Allen once decreed, \u201cis for the birds.\u201d<\/p>\n

Well, yes \u2018n\u2019 no.<\/p>\n

\u201cOur fine-feathered friends may be great fans of artwork, for a good reason,\u201d I find myself countering, \u201cbut even when they blitz it with their white bombs, it\u2019s still art that human beings can appreciate.\u201d<\/p>\n

In case you haven\u2019t guessed, I\u2019m among those humans.<\/p>\n

I periodically meander into places not far from my Ross Valley home to re-appreciate stuff I\u2019ve treasured before.<\/p>\n

My 8-year-old granddaughter often tags along.<\/p>\n

I just like looking. Hannah\u2019s favorites are those she can climb.<\/p>\n

So, naturally, she\u2019s long been partial to Sugarfoot, the antlered stag that stands tall on the lawn outside San Anselmo\u2019s Town Hall.<\/p>\n

She\u2019s been climbing on the anatomically correct metallic critter ever since she was 3 \u2014 so her rump has greatly added to the sheen of the sculpture\u2019s back.<\/p>\n

She originally decided Sugarfoot was a lost Santa reindeer who\u2019d chosen my adopted hometown as his.<\/p>\n

And was magical.<\/p>\n

Now she just considers him a handy place from which she can hang upside down.<\/p>\n

Hannah has also enjoyed caressing the abstract marble Bufano bear that stands on a pedestal in front of the Ross Town Hall, a gift from residents Jerry and Peggy Flax.<\/p>\n

I, too, like the bear \u2014 and most of the work by San Francisco sculptor Benny Bufano.<\/p>\n

But I also relish that he was a blunt-speaking peacenik.<\/p>\n

He reportedly, after an accident severed it, sent half his \u201ctrigger finger\u201d to Woodrow Wilson in protest of World War I.<\/p>\n

Years later, after Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy had been assassinated, he sculpted \u201cSt. Francis of the Guns\u201d out of melted-down weapons turned in by citizens.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m pretty sure his Ross bear bears no political statement, though.<\/p>\n

The artist, in a tale that might be apocryphal, purportedly advised the town on the animal\u2019s care and feeding, including an admonition to \u201cpolish regularly with Carnauba auto wax.\u201d<\/p>\n

Early this year, Ross hired a contractor to repair cracks and other damage in the marble. Since then, the town\u2019s prohibited kids from scaling it, even for photos.<\/p>\n

Before the fixes, however, we managed to snap a couple of Hannah giving it, logically, a big bear hug.<\/p>\n

Since she\u2019s a consummate animal freak (no surprise \u2014 her abode, where a barnload of horses used to board, is now home to a dog, a cat, two goats and two pet lizards), she also adores Al Guibara\u2019s bronze statue of Blackie the horse on a Tiburon pasture.<\/p>\n

She loves, too, hanging out in Imagination Park \u2014 land of a gadzillion selfies, adjacent to San Anselmo\u2019s town hall \u2014 with the Lawrence Noble pop-art bronze statues of film characters Yoda and Indiana Jones.<\/p>\n

Both are life-sized, although Indy\u2019s about 6-foot-3 and Yoda merely 2-1\/2 feet high.<\/p>\n

Marin\u2019s most famed artwork, in my view, is the Civic Center, an imaginative structure in San Rafael built after the death of Frank Lloyd Wright, who designed it.<\/p>\n

The golden spired, sky-blue roofed tourist attraction \u2014 a location for the sci-fi movie \u201cGattaca\u201d and Lucas\u2019 first feature-length film, \u201cTHX\u201d \u2014 was Wright\u2019s last commission and is somehow still avant-garde today, 53 years after the first section was completed.<\/p>\n

I cherish it.<\/p>\n

Almost as much as I hate most monochromatic oils hanging in museums that demand I take a wild guess at what bizarre sense of beauty an artist had in mind while slapping paint onto a canvas.<\/p>\n

The truth is, virtually any art is problematic for me because it can\u2019t be attached to my refrigerator with a magnet like Hannah\u2019s hand-drawn thingies.<\/p>\n

Still, she and I often jointly enjoy examining the charming, playful murals in Fairfax that adorn the tall outer wall of a Bolinas Avenue store or the short wall at the nearby baseball field, as well as the colorful obelisk in front of the Ross Valley Fire Station in downtown San Anselmo.<\/p>\n

Not to mention the sky paintings made by jet planes or shifting clouds or blinking stars.<\/p>\n

Humorist Dave Barry once defined public art as that which \u201cis purchased by experts who are not spending their own personal money.\u201d<\/p>\n

He may be right.<\/p>\n

But writer Oscar Wilde was definitely wrong when he proclaimed, \u201cAll art is quite useless.\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s fun.<\/p>\n

Contact Woody Weingarten at voodee@sbcglobal.net<\/a> or check out his blog at www.vitalitypress.com\/<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cPublic art,\u201d country music singer and visual artist Terry Allen once decreed, \u201cis for the birds.\u201d Well, yes \u2018n\u2019 no. \u201cOur fine-feathered friends may be great fans of artwork, for…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":32,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"yasr_overall_rating":0,"yasr_post_is_review":"","yasr_auto_insert_disabled":"","yasr_review_type":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-17129","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-woody-weingarten"},"yasr_visitor_votes":{"stars_attributes":{"read_only":true,"span_bottom":"