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Since Nancy's friend Judith is in Worcester for some academic project, we thought we'd make a day long outing and combine getting together with her with getting together with Mark the hermit potter of Worcester. Mark suggested seeing Building Form: Ansel Adams & Architecture at the Worcester Art Museum. Adams is, of course, more famous for his photos of national parks.
The only Adams architectural photos I remember seeing before were of St. Francis church in Ranchos de Taos, New Mexico. I consciously tried to imitate one of them in my series of the same church taken in 1995 when I was driving around New Mexico after the Natalie Goldberg workshop at Ghost Ranch. Of course, it is hard to imitate a black and white photo in color and even harder to imitate a view camera with a 35mm. So, I was pretty eager to soak in the Ansel Adams views of buildings.
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My photos of St. Francis church ended up being mine - influenced but really not imitating.
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Full of blueberry soup and raspberry ice cream, we approached the Ansel Adams exhibit.I love to look at art, especially photography, but I don't really have the training and vocabulary to talk about the visual elements of line, form, texture, pattern, and contrast and so on or what it means when they talk about "building form" in Adams' photographic compositions. I can say that he uses shadows and architectural detail and placement in the landscape to create images that are concrete and abstract at the same time. Lines and curves interact all over the place. One architectural element inverts another one and creates amazing negative spaces.
The exhibit includes 48 photographs that range from photos of architecture situated within the landscape (that is, whole buildings in space) to photos that showcase the architectural form independent of the landscape. All the photos were taken between the 1920s and the late 1960s. Locations/landscapes included the southwest, Cape Cod, San Francisco, and of course New York. Why does every photographer have to do the exact same New York skyline as seen from Steiglitz' studio? At least that's what it looks like. The New York skyline in luminous silver grays seems almost a cliche. A panorama of San Francisco from a distances glittering like the Emerald City of Oz, however, does not. Even though "California as the promised land" has become a cliche, Adams' view really made me feel like I was looking at a New Jerusalem (have I thrown in enough metaphors here?). My favorite, and Nancy's favorite, was an adobe wall with a window in the middle and deep shadows from the viga beams crossing it. It was very abstract and mysterious. It made you keep wanting to look at it again and again.
The Worcester Art Museum is known for its collection of Italian Renaissance paintings, so we had to take those in too. Quite a contrast to the Adams' black and white buildings! We spent a long time among them soaking in the colors and the religious themes. By the time we went upstairs to indulge my taste in 20th century abstracts, our eyes and sensibilities were in a Renaissance mode and the huge abstract canvases looked course and peculiar. As the museum was closing we took in part of the gallery of pre-Columbian artifacts. We could easily have spent another hour or two but the museum closed on us at 5:00 PM.
Mark, Nancy, and I sat on the front steps of the museum looking at old Worcester buildings with Ansel Adams eyes noticing the round quadruple chimneys and the juxtaposition of curved versus rectilinear shapes, and the late afternoon light on the New England brick. We were deep into converting the Worcester skyline to art when Judith arrived.
We had dinner with Judith at Da Lat, a Vietnamese restaurant where I ate with Mark something like 4 years ago and still remember vividly partly because of the weird fruit shakes - jack fruit, green bean, sapota, durian... and partly because our waiter was watching a world cup match on a little tv just inside the kitchen. The world cup being already over for this year, and its being prime dinner time there was no tv blaring from the kitchen this time. The food was as good as I remembered it, and as cheap. Most of the other diners were Vietnamese.
I had a dish that sounds like it would suck but is quite delicious: tofu with tomatoes and pineapple. That's right: tomatoes and pineapple. The tomatoes were whole ripe garden tomatoes, juicy and melting in my mouth like the first taste of summer. The pineapple was sweet/sour/tangy and played off the tomatoes very well. The tofu absorbed all the flavors and sang with spiciness. My jack fruit shake was just like I remembered it: sweetly exotic. Nancy had a green bean shake, which I tasted and liked. It had an earthier quality than the jack fruit. Judith had a sapota shake, which I did not taste but she liked it.
This was my first encounter with Judith and I was a little bit aware of wanting her to approve of me as a partner for Nancy. I guess I worried unnecessarily, because we hit it off just fine.
I got tired before the end of dinner but Judith was still going strong and wanted to do something after dinner. We ended up going to the Indian restaurant down the street from Da Lat for dessert. The desserts were great but I started to fade after about 20 minutes. By the time we wound up the evening and I drove Nancy home all I wanted to do was collapse into bed and sleep til next week.
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