Monthly Archives: February 2015

Gillette & Paramount Ranches

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King Gillette Ranch
Paramount Ranch
Santa Monica Mountains
February 21, 2015

We probably would not have thought of the Santa Monica Mountain nature reserve as a place with historical or cultural resources, if we had not seen the Gillette Ranch listed in the Passport 2 History. We have enjoyed exploring other historical sites we found in that booklet, and decided this time to visit the ranch. As we explored the National Park Service website in preparation for our visit, we read about the nearby Paramount Ranch as well, and decided to see both ranches.

The Gillette mansion was built by architect Wallace Neff in 1928 for King Camp Gillette, founder of the Gillette Safety Razor Company. Hollywood movie director Clarence Brown purchased the property in 1935 and added to it. It had a series of later owners including the Claretian religious order, which ran a seminary there and build a dormitory and some classroom buildings. The property has been part of the public park since 2005. The visitor center is located in what used to be the stables. It features an informative video about the entire Santa Monica Mountain park area and exhibits about the local environment. We went on Oscar weekend, so there was a photo exhibit set up showing still photos from various movies filmed in the surrounding area.

Gillette_Ranch

After we explored the visitor center we walked out and around the Gillette mansion and Claretian dormitory building, then went back to our car. From there we drove several miles over to the Paramount Ranch.

Several film studios once owned extensive acreage in the Santa Monica Mountains, including Paramount Studios. Numerous films and television shows have been filmed in the area from the 1920’s on, either on the Paramount Ranch property that we visited, or in nearby areas owned by other studios. The long list of films we perused on the park website, that were filmed at least in part on the Paramount Ranch, included (to name just a few films), Morocco (1930), several W. C. Fields movies, numerous Westerns in the 1920’s and 30’s, Beau Geste (1939), The Love Bug (1968) and its sequels, and most recently American Sniper (2014). The area we explored was the Western Town. Featuring about 20 wooden structures built as a movie set in the 1950’s, it looks like the stereotypical old western town. That set was used for various productions for several decades, including the television show Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman in the 1990’s. It is apparently still used from time to time for film shoots or other professional photography, requiring special permits from the National Park Service. A ranger said that visitors may take photos for personal use, however. (We are not entirely sure if we are allowed to post the photos we took at the Western Town, so will not do so here.)

The Santa Monica Mountains are a beautiful area with many hiking trails. We did not explore them with Margaret, of course, but we saw many other visitors out for walks and several equestrians. At the Gillette Ranch we stayed on paved paths. At the Paramount Ranch we were able to push her wheelchair over the hard packed ground in the Western Town.

There were no dining facilities at either of those stops, but there are a number of communities in and around the Santa Monica Mountain area. We decided to stop in Calabasas on our way, and we ate at the Sagebrush Cantina, a restaurant we know and like. Margaret was not in a decisive mood when it came to ordering lunch, but eventually she settled on the chicken mole enchilada, which she enjoyed very much. We each had carnitas tacos, which were excellent. Margaret was quiet at first, but then opened up to reminisce fondly about her grandmother, after Meredith mentioned a letter she had received recently from Margaret’s cousin Jocelyn. Margaret also remembered an archaeological dig she had been on many years ago in the Wood Ranch area of Simi Valley.

Admission to the two National Park sites we visited was free. However, the surrounding area also includes state and local parks. The ranger staffing the Gillette visitor center explained to another guest that there is a day use/parking charge at the nearby Malibu Creek State Park. The park staff at both sites were very friendly and helpful.

After our visit the Los Angeles Times wrote up the Paramount Ranch site — both the Western Town and surrounding trails — in its recurring “LA Walks” column.

Timken Museum

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Timken Museum of Art
Balboa Park, San Diego
February 15, 2015

First, let us say this is one of our most favorite museums! Located in the heart of Balboa Park in San Diego, the Timken is a small museum with an excellent art collection which offers free admission.

We have been here many times over the years; we often stop by when doing something else in Balboa Park. On this most recent visit, we hiked 4 miles round trip, from the northwest corner of the park around the Aerospace Museum and back to where we started. We stopped at the Timken partway through the walk.

Timken_Raphael

We made this visit to see a special exhibition: Raphael’s painting The Madonna of the Pinks, on loan from the National Gallery in London. It will be here through April 26, 2015. Later this year the Timken will be exhibiting another piece on loan, Vermeer’s Woman in Blue Reading a Letter, from May 11 through September 11, 2015, on loan from Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum. In exchange the Timken is lending its prize possession, Rembrandt’s painting Saint Bartholomew, to the National Gallery and the Rijksmuseum.

The permanent collection spans nearly six centuries, from early Renaissance to late nineteenth century paintings, and includes pieces from Italy, the United States, France, and the Lowlands. The museum also houses an extensive collection of Russian icons. The guards are very pleasant, and they are also knowledgeable about the collection, more so than we have found at most museums.

Bob was particularly taken by an 1880 Eastman Johnson painting in the American gallery, The Cranberry Harvest, Nantucket Island. Meredith enjoyed seeing an old favorite, Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s 1557 painting Parable of the Sower. Many years ago our youngest daughter, then in grade school, realized as soon as she saw the painting what parable it illustrated, displaying her Scripture knowledge without prompting from us.

As noted above, admission to the Timken is free. Please do make whatever donation you can afford, though; fine art needs conserving, and like all museums the Timken needs funds to operate. Parking is free in Balboa Park. We did not have Margaret with us this time, but handicapped access seems adequate here. There is no café in the museum; there is a café nearby in the park and several other grab and go snack options.

LACMA-Delacroix

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Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA)
Wilshire Boulevard, Miracle Mile
February 7, 2015

This visit fell on the first full weekend of February, so we took advantage of LACMA’s participation in the Bank of America Museums on Us program, and strolled around the art museum campus today. Last month we had noticed an article in the Los Angeles Times about an Eugene Delacroix painting on exhibit for a short time, Greece on the Ruins of Missolonghi. The painting is on loan from the Museum of Fine Arts in Bordeaux, France. It is an allegorical painting made in 1826, featuring a feminine figure symbolizing Greece mourning over those killed by the Turks during the unsuccessful defense of the port city of Missolonghi. The exhibition did a good job of explaining the symbolism in the painting itself and also showing other contemporary pieces to give context to the work.

LACMA Colombia

We also went through a special exhibit, A Journey through the Cauca Valley, featuring prehistoric Colombian ceramic pieces in the Art of the Americas building, and we strolled through part of the permanent collection in that building as well. Although the Delacroix exhibit was easy to find, the Colombian and one other small special exhibition (Louise Nevelson) that we looked for were not well marked, nor did the guards we spoke to know where they were, which seemed a bit odd. Even a docent wearing a red apron with large lettering that said “ASK ME” could not tell us where the Nevelson exhibition was. Nevertheless, it was a pleasant outing. Our hunt for the special exhibitions let us through various galleries in the permanent collection we might not have browsed otherwise, and we enjoyed many of the pieces we looked at along the way.

The museum is located at the west end of Hancock Park; the Page Museum, better known as the La Brea tar pits museum, is at the east end of the park. We parked at the east end of Hancock Park, in the lot that is actually associated with the Page Museum. That lot cost us $10, the weekend rate. There is also parking in a garage at the west end of the museum, which costs $12. We strolled through part of the park, stopping to listen to a busker play first a piccolo and then a banjo.

Admission to LACMA is $15 for adults, $10 for seniors. Wheelchair accessibility throughout the museum is good, although we had to make frequent use of elevators, because different parts of the campus are connected on different levels, and there is a fair amount of going up and down to get from one building to another.

We had lunch at Johnnie’s New York Pizzeria, just a short walk east of the museum on Wilshire. That is our go-to lunch destination when we visit a museum on Wilshire’s Museum Row. We enjoyed Johnnie’s, as always, and the staff recognized us. Margaret and Bob had their usual dishes there, turkey panini for her and chicken panini for him. Meredith tried and liked the Chicken Puttanesca.

We had a nice visit with Margaret, apart from a little upset at the beginning. Bob’s aunt Min writes Margaret frequently and encloses photos with her letters. When we visit, Margaret always likes to share the latest letter she has received from Min. She had some trouble finding it this time, and snapped at her caregiver. He is very patient and hunted the letter out without taking offense, and we went on our way. After that, Margaret was calm and fairly alert and verbal. She asked after our daughters and commented on a news article Meredith had sent her a couple of weeks ago, about the possible restoration of the Southwest Museum. Margaret also mentioned her recent visit with Jennifer, the independent geriatric care manager we have check in on Margaret monthly, and she proudly told us that she had beaten Jennifer at Scrabble. We suspect Jennifer may have let her win, but we had heard independently that Margaret had done quite well with word formation. All in all it was good to see Margaret functioning well on this visit.

Huntington Library

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Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens
San Marino
February 1, 2015

The two of us made this visit without Margaret. Pasadena and the adjacent area boast several excellent museums, but they are too far from the San Fernando Valley to make it easy to bring her here.

We were in Pasadena for the weekend volunteering as extras on the set of Phd Movie 2, the second movie based on Jorge Cham’s webcomic, Phd Comics. The first movie can be streamed here. We were in several scenes filmed Saturday, on the Cal Tech campus, but they did not need us for Sunday, so we headed to the Huntington right after church.

Huntington_entrance

The Huntington is an extensive facility and even though we were there all day – weekend hours are 10:30 AM to 4:30 PM – we could not see it all. We decided to focus mainly on art, skipping the library building and seeing only part of the gardens. We first toured the European art collection, which is housed in the building which used to be the Huntington family mansion. It has a particularly strong English collection, including such artists as Gainsborough, Constable, Turner, and Reynolds. The museum has a particularly well known Gainsborough piece, The Blue Boy, and across the gallery is a portrait by Lawrence of a young girl known as Pinkie. The bulk of the European collection dates from the 18th and 19th centuries.

We next went on to the American art building. It holds pieces representing all periods from colonial through modern, and it was interesting to look at the pieces that were contemporary with the European art we had seen in the prior building. In the special exhibit gallery in that building was Samuel F. B. Morse’s painting Gallery of the Louvre dating from 1831-1833. Best known as the inventor of the telegraph, Morse began his career as a painter. In this colossal work he shows a gallery within the Louvre, populated with nearly 40 selected paintings of his choosing, including a variety of both sacred and secular works, such as the Mona Lisa, Caravaggio’s Fortune Teller, and a Raphael Madonna and Child.

In both buildings the decorative arts were also represented, and there were contemporary furniture pieces displayed with the paintings and sculpture, particularly in the American collection. We particularly enjoyed a room in the American art building given over to Arts and Crafts pieces and the work of Greene & Greene.

We went on from the American art building to see a special exhibition in a third building, the Boone Gallery, which was displaying photographs by Bruce Davidson and Paul Caponigro. The exhibition displayed photographs they each took during visits to Britain and Ireland in the 1960s and later. The exhibition was quite extensive and really gave a sense of photography as an art form, with compelling photos both of locations and people.

Huntington_M

As we walked around the gardens from one building to another and briefly over to the Chinese garden at the far end of the property, we saw many families with small children. We had not seen small children in the art galleries (wise parents), but we can understand that the gardens would be a wonderful place to stroll with family on a nice day. We saw a number of beautiful flowers in bloom. The rose garden, of course, was dormant given the time of year, but must be spectacular when in bloom. We did go into the conservatory building and stroll through the rain forest and bog rooms, looking at various orchids and also carnivorous plants.

Although we did not have Margaret with us, we did look around to assess wheelchair accessibility, which generally seems quite good. The grounds are so extensive that it might be a challenge for a manual wheelchair user, just because of the distances, but the grounds are mostly flat or gently sloping. We were surprised to see that the elevator in the European art building was out of service, and if we had brought Margaret we would not have been able to take her up to the second floor. A guard told us that was a rare occurrence, however.

We picked up sandwiches in the café and ate at tables outdoors. We each chose smoked salmon with cream cheese on a bagel and had some fresh fruit on the side. The food was pricey but of good quality.

Admission is $23 for adults. There is no additional charge for parking.