Healdsburg

So a week ago I was in Healdsburg, taking a class from Lisa Thorpe on marbling on fabric. Details of that will go into another post. I gave myself two extra days in town so I could turn it into a vacation rather than just a class. I've discovered you can easily obtain that "got out of town" feeling, even if the town is an hour and a half's drive away. Plus, I've never been to Healdsburg, it's always just been a highway sign or two on the way to somewhere else.

It reminds me of Sonoma as much as anything. An old town square, surrounded by buildings that are largely meant for tourists: clothes, restaurants, two bookstores (yay!), and lots of wine tasting opportunities. Wine does less and less for me lately and I wanted to be up early each day and not fuzzy headed, so I passed on the wine. But the bookstores were fun and this town specializes in the kind of antique store that fills up a barn's worth of space with both large/expensive things, and cheaper, interesting things. These large stores are divided up into "rooms", little cubby holes made with the larger pieces of furniture, and filled with kitchenware, bedding, books, strange chests and old birdcages. The owners are friendly and relaxed, probably because the stores are filled with cameras trained upon you while you shop. I'm really OK with that, because I would not stay long looking if there was an anxious person hovering over me the whole time. In one of them I found several objects that I will use in printing and soy wax resist projects.

Anyway, I bought things on day 1, went to the lesson on day 2 and walked around buying very little on day 3. I'm glad that I pushed myself past the point of buying things just because I am visiting a new place. Because sometimes the most valuable things are the memories you bring back. Memories best gained by walking around a lot with a camera. So here I go.....

My hotel's back entrance, the best way into town, opened up onto a working street where things get fixed, repainted, stored, etc. This is a Wonderbread delivery truck, perhaps retired from actual bread delivery. Recognize the Wonderbread dots?  I was fascinated to find that only the blue dots crackled and peeled, the reds and yellows where holding out pretty well.

A block away, headed into town, is what remains of the Mill District. That is, just some old equipment and old buildings and some larger trees. It is all fenced off. By the next time I visit, it will probably be a huge construction zone, by the time after that, a bunch of condominiums with this object below preserved to give the area some local flavor.

Because of the mill and other ventures, the railroad tracks run through here. I explored this area more in the afternoon, with more photos, but for now, this is what you see as you walk into town and approach the traffic circle.

Veering off to one side of the circle is a long walking/biking path. I saw mostly walkers, almost no bikes. It makes for a mid-sized pleasant walk but probably not all that thrilling as a bike adventure.

My first find was a huge and confident raven, using the asphalt to crack acorns. I took several blurry photos, turned them into black and white images where the blurriness didn't matter, and pasted them onto a mottled background.

Here are the separate photos. Since my cell phone is not too dependable when it comes to clarity (I think it may steam up a bit in my pocket, it generally gets better once I've been using it a while), it was fun to stop trying to change the photos into anything resembling quality and just go for the silhouette and shadow effect:

He obligingly sat on the fence for a larger photo when we humans got too close to his snack operation, so I took a closer photo and turned it into a shadow with another photo blended behind it. I should clean off, or at least minimize, the black stripes that result when you layer two photos and one is smaller than the other.

Healdsburg has given it's artists free reign on this path. The benches are highly individualistic.

I suspect the phone was a later addition:

There was also this metal horse grazing alongside the path

Comprised of a lot of different metal bits, looking like one of those illustrations of musculature. For some reason it kind of creeps me out, I wanted to cover it with skin to protect its insides.

The path runs alongside several older buildings and some wineries. Since I am a part of a neighborhood winemaking coop, the smells are very familiar even though the equipment is vastly larger than our neighborhood effort. The week I travelled was the same week that Pacific Gas and Electric was threatening/promising/offering to turn off the power to hundreds of thousands of people to prevent fires sparking in the strong winds (that never quite arrived). The Bay Area was panicked, gassing up cars, buying bags of ice, etc. But up here, aside from the gas lines, people were pretty nonchalant, assuming they didn't have stores with no power source. Ultimately the power did not stay off long. But places like this winery seem to always have generators handy, so this one was just plugging along, steel gray posts and piles, along with an aqua-blue generator to keep it all chugging along.

There was a nice rusty bridge at the end of the trail, along with a skate park. Reading the fine print on Google too fast, I had hoped that it was going to be a "state park" and envisioned something with regular bathrooms and tall trees. But it wasn't a bad place to pause before returning.

In defiance of the high winds forecast, Thursday morning was completely still. Which was nice because I keep trying to get photos of dried grasses and they are the first things to sway in the wind. These were leaning up against a chain link fence with the sun coming through them.

Returning to the hotel. I think these are Tree of Heaven, but my Google search lets me know that I might be confusing it with sumac or several kinds of nuts. Anyway, it grows quite vigorously and looks like the kind of thing that might pop up uninvited and reach quite a few feet before you even notice it.

One of the little cubbyholes in the motel I stayed at (L & M Motel, http://landmmotel.com, really nice, you park your car right outside your room; it's an old fashioned motor lodge type motel and has home made berry scones in the morning. Highly recommended, just don't all come the next night I'm planning on being there because I loved the quiet). Anyway, these is a glass topped wicker table with parts of it reflecting, parts of it see through, ashtray on top, sky and fence reflected. The layers are so complex I can't actually figure them out myself when I look at it.

After lunch I walked in the other direction along the tracks shown above until I reached a small, dusty park alongside the Russian River.  I imagine it floods there in the rainy season, the sand was piled up many feet high between the river and the grass. Here was a line of floats on the edge of the park, purpose unknown.

They made an interesting black and white photo

And also turned sepia with a textured layer behind it (texture courtesy of the woven hotel lampshade)

Alongside the tracks, which look like trains still travel on them, is the old Healdsburg railroad station. The station is all boarded up with do not enter signs but I swear I could hear some motion behind the boards.

This is the back of one of the derelict buildings within the area that is about to be cleared for the Mill District condo complex. Who knows if it will be there next time I visit.

No trespassing sign and strange old equipment, faded version.

I love rust and ruins. There was a stack of old railroad ties and nails. I think these bits held the cross pieces of wood to the steel rails.  So much busyness once upon a time, such inactivity and waste now.

Peeking into the future construction area through a grommet in the solid fencing.

Here at the end is a little sign fantasy and then a coastal trip. The railroad crossing sign was several blocks away, where a bit of park ran into the track area. My photo didn't turn out too good, the white part was overexposed and glowed strangely. So I converted it to a threshold image, either pure black or pure white.

Then I started messing with the background, trying to introduce color back into it. Not too successfully, once something becomes pale on my phone it can be difficult to darken it back up without it looking strange.

Still fiddling around, I applied the kaleidoscope filter to the crossroads sign. And discovered something that is a lot of fun: making patterns out of text. Another post to follow with brighter examples, but here is how it started.

You can shift the spokes around in this ToolWiz feature. The more spokes, the smaller the details. You can also shift around which part of the image gets used. With photos you just look for something pretty. With letters there is a new goal, to have part of the words and phrases showing.

You can also make mirror images, adjust them relative to each other, and set them within several shape options.

Here I took the original image and blacked out most of the background.

It makes the text stand out more, looking almost like strips of print have been cut out and laid down on a dark background.

Adding some color. Better photos to come, though the words on the crossing guard sign are perfect for playing with.

At the end of my walk down the tracks I came back to civilization, downtown, and enjoyed these yellow-orange balloons meant to draw you into a wine tasting bar. Failed on that point, but attracted me to take photos nevertheless. Olive trees behind.

So returning to the Bay Area on Friday, I decided to take the long way along the coast rather than fight with traffic for an hour. This is the coast looking north from Bodega Bay head.

There were tule elk on this spit of land. They didn't seem at all impressed by the car on the road that stopped and produced some clicking noises from an oblong black object.

They could barely be bothered to look at me and certainly didn't think they needed to move to a safer location. I like that kind of independence in a deer....

Tomales: the Not a Bank building. I'm not quite sure what it is, but is is definitely not a bank....

Church bell tower. This building is instead content to be what it is, a Catholic Church. All of the oldest churches around this part of the coast are Catholic. I need to read up on the history of who settled the towns.....Spanish or Portuguese people I am guessing. I wander out here a lot but don't know enough of the history.

That's it....back home, rinsed and dried my art samples, cleaned a bit, never enough, and went back to my art projects and classes. I need to clone myself because I should also be gardening while the weather is still nice.