March 2022 – The Inner Frame

The Interior Life of Rocks

Here are some recently split geodes.

These geodes are probably the only brown thing here that have something beautiful inside.

Which is rather sad, given that everything here is brown.

Mostly.

Up and Down (Muir Woods II)

What to do with a long day in Muir Woods National Monument?

Let’s begin with the Redwood Creek Trail, but then avoid the crowds by climbing up Canopy trail.

Descend along Fern Trail back to Redwood Creek Trail, and continue up up up Bootjack Trail, all the way to the antique Mountain Theater.

Connect via Old Mine Trail to Dipsea Trail, enjoy the views, and follow it all the way down to the end, closing the loop.

(There were enough water fountains on the way to keep me hydrated.)

Trillium Ovale (Muir Woods I)

At this time of the year, the monthlong Brown here in the Midwest is broken by the appearance of the first Spring wildflower, the Snow Trillium.

I have written too often about it.

At the same time of the year, the Pacific woods already burst with wildflowers.

Here we see the Trillium ovatum, whose white flowers slowly turn pink while they age.

The threefold symmetry sees the occasional exception with the appearance of a quadrillium, which has fourfold symmetry, like the four leaf clover. With astonishment I saw here a specimen with two-fold symmetry of leaves, petals, stamen and sepals. Duollium?

S v Z

Here are some impressions from Tauba Auerbach’s exhibition S v Z at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

Their work has been concerned with traditional questions of art – interactions of shape, matter, light, and how to represent them.

The stubborn simplicity of patterns (repetitions in space, iterations in time) is contrasted with a granular reality of the objects themselves, or that of the medium which is chosen to represent them.