Our son Jon came up from LA for a friends wedding this weekend. On Friday I took him to Benicia to see my current show "Black - White".
But when we arrived......
They were closed and didn't open for another hour!
So I decided to take Jon on a little tour of historic Benicia
which used to be our State Capitol for about a nano-second.
The "tour" included the Old Arsenal buildings that are being used as Art Studio's,
Historic Downtown and of course - The Camel Barns!
Camels in Benicia????? Who knew?
The camels were a U.S. government experiment in the mid 1800's prior to the Civil War. They wanted to use them for military travel through the arid Southwest and for future railroad survey crews.
The camel barns were built in 1855 and are built from some amazing chiseled stone. And even though the camels preformed beautifully in the experiment it turned out that they were too smelly, hard to handle and upset the horses.....
so you now can actually have your very own wedding in a camel barn!
Around the back we noticed a bunch of old wood that was protected by an open structure.
Jon spotted a hole where the anchor came though.......It was a ship, the Galilee from 1891.
Next we headed out on the pier where a few birds, several fishermen and one shy sea lion greeted us.
Every time the sea lion came up for air, I would try to snap a photo of him
but he was too quick and after 706 photos, I still didn't get a good shot of him.
I think he was just messin' with my mind!
So I just decided to take a picture of someone who was a little more stationary.
Then it was time to head over to the show!
Samples of Light - Medium - Dark
The gallery is set up to move from lighter paintings to the darker ones........
My painting "The Sound of Silence" is in the "medium" section.
These self-portraits were done by the group of women that I paint with - Bay Area Studio Artists.
Top: Suzun Almquist
next down left "yours truly" on the right - Sue Bonebakker
Third row down left is Joanne Taeuffer and right is Marcy Wheeler
Bottom row is left - Ellen Reintjes and right Sharon Tama
On Sunday - Nov. 15th we will be having an
Art Talk & Tour of our work from 1-3pm.
Hope to see you there!
"A camel makes an elephant feel like a jet plane."
-- Jackie Kennedy
