Cranky Old Guy

We went to the First Saturday Art Walk last night. The weather was pleasant for it; high 70’s and breezy. But…their just wasn’t much to get excited about. Part of that is our fault as we don’t go to all of the galleries and we really need to expand our horizons. We have a short list of about 5 regular venues and last night that only took 90 minutes to see what they had to offer.

The Chico Art House is always a pleasant place to start the tour and you get a chance to see how their vegetable garden is doing at the same time. It’s doing great! There is a lot of sculpture and you have to wander through the garden to see it all. In the middle of the garden is a potters workplace and you can go inside and see the ceramic art. Their ceramic art is always among my favorites.

Then we went to the Chico Art Center at the Amtrak station. There was an ongoing show from two Chico artists with very different styles. One was serene with lovely shading of colors that created a soft landscape look; sky and earth and water. In fact, I don’t remember seeing any vertical elements in any of the pieces. The other was explosive. Great swirls of color and motion. Exciting. It reminded me of grandson Zach’s work.

When we got to All Fired Up, we started seeing works that we had seen last year. Interesting but not very exciting. More of the same next door at 1078 Gallery. And it was the same at the Chico Paper Company. More boring. A couple more stops and we were through for the evening; except for dinner of course.

We decided to visit a restaurant that we had been to a very long time ago; California Pasta Productions. Time has not been kind to this restaurant and it definitely needs some restoration. Maybe just some simple cleaning and paint would help. The food was OK; I had a smoked salmon fettuccini dish and the salmon overpowered the dish. It was more like a smoked salmon stew. And they had no O’Doul’s. In fact, no NA beer at all and they seemed quite proud of that fact. A bad beginning!