The Spirit Rider of the Seasons

I promised to write about public art in Antioch that I ride my bike past, but like so many projects, I've gotten a bit behind. But I'll try to get back on it.

This piece — "The Spirit Rider of the Seasons" — is right down the street from me. I rode my bike down the hill to photograph it with  my funky Panasonic GF2 and a pinhole lens for Worldwide Pinhole Day on Sunday, April 28.

I remember shooting this sculpture for the local, now defunct newspaper when it was being installed back in 1993. I met the artist, David Govedare as the large-scale steel sculpture was being attached to its concrete and granite base.

Like almost all public art in Antioch, this piece is slightly cheesy, but it's still my favorite in the city. And I enjoyed playing with my pinhole camera. I don't think I'll enjoy picking all the stickers out of my socks.

Art in Antioch, part 2

I'd promised myself I'd create a series of entries about the public art the Antioch area that I ride my bike past. This is entry number two, so I have a long way to go before I can really call it a series.

"The Drop" by Barbara Grygutis is a 35-foot tall stainless steel piece just outside the Antioch Water Park across from Deer Vally High School on Lone Tree. I'd seen it at a distance and thought "OK, another nice safe piece of metal. At least it isn't a guy on a horse." But up close it starts to be a lot more fun. It really is monumental — it needs to be to visually compete with the nearby traffic lights. The reflected glare of the sun makes the surface shimmer in a fascinating way. The surface isn't solid, but you can't really see through it either. The curves are graceful, even though it feels overly "thick" to me. I enjoyed it more when I stopped thinking of it as a drop.  It's really it bit too weighty, massive and stable to conjure up "drop." Instead, just appreciating it for what it is, made it a lot more satisfying.

That's my Roubaix in the foreground, just for scale, and because this is a bicycle blog.

Art in Antioch, part 1

I'm going to try adding a new feature to this blog: Public art that I see on my bike rides in East County, particularly Antioch, Oakley, Brentwood and Pittsburg.

When Tricia and I rode past the new sculpture at the corner of Rockspring and Mt. Hamilton in Antioch, I swear I thought Antioch had at last embraced a Dr. Seuss world view. The piece, by artist Robert Ellison, is both monumental and whimsical. It twists like the wind is about to take it down, and looks like... well, it looks exactly how it looks. If you don't smile, or even laugh, when you see it you're just missing out on life somehow.

As with much of the public art in Antioch, the problem isn't the art as much as it is Antioch. As fun as the piece is, it's dwarfed by the surrounding homes and light poles. I can't help but think how much more interesting this piece would be in a less crowded environment. Maybe it says something about Antioch that the largest pieces of public sculpture in the area are traffic lights. We're so used to them we don't see them, but they are amazingly large cantilevered light-emitting, sway-in-the-wind, big-dollar public monuments. This little piece has a hard time competing.

Judging from the newspaper web site comments, this piece seem to be confounding the citizenry of Antioch much as the delightful Sprint Poles befuddled the city of Concord a few years ago. I always fear we'll only get the art we deserve. I'm hoping this shows that isn't always true. This work is a step up from a lot of the trite, predictable pieces we have elsewhere in the city. I hope it's a trend.