Can I Walk There?: 2025

Saturday, January 4, 2025

Amaryllis Baby --- Day 14/9

Walk: Presidio and Hood

Distance: 5 miles

So Ciwt's gift amaryllis arrived a bit after Thanksgiving. Since then the weather has been cold (for San Francisco) so she has been watering it just a bit and carrying it to the warmest room each evening. Even with all that tending, she's been looking at the shriveling leaves at top and feeling concerned her amaryllis baby was ailing.

But on today's walk she looked in the window of a flower shop near her home and saw, shriveling leaves and all, her plant is well and on its way to flowering. Wonder what color it will be?

P.S. The flower shop she mentioned, Bloomers, has been serving the finest homes and occasions out here for decades. If any of her readers ever want to send a special arrangement to a local friend, you can count on them.

Friday, January 3, 2025

Iphone Can't Do It --- Day 14/8

Walk: Not sure (rain, cold, 2025 new bookkeeping matters)

Distance: n/a for now

Ciwt's iPhone camera can't capture the intensity and liveliness of Amy Sherald's paint. And, really neither does the camera SFMOMA's photographer used for its website shots of its her portrait show: Amy Sherald: American Sublime. But then no camera ever completely captures the living, breathing personhood of actual individuals.

Sherald though, comes as close as humanly possible. And the presence of her portraits is arresting and moving. If you can get to SFMOMA - or New York's Whitney Museum or the Washington, DC Portrait Gallery where Sherald's show will travel - Ciwt strongly urges you to do so.

She was nearly stopped in her tracks when she first walked through the show. She could have photographed every portrait. Each one was alive and deeply touching. Sherald's aim is to capture her subject's essence, their unique and sublime humanity, and she does just that.

She chooses just the right model, outfits them in clothes that speak, paints them in grey skin tones (they are all black people) that bypass their blackness and go right to their essence. She paints them big and most powerfully she paints them in intense colors that arrest you and call to you at the same time. She paints them looking right at you and hangs them low so you, you the viewer, aren't just looking at the people; you're communicating with them at the same level. You know them, their aliveness and feel for them and with them as a human being. It is quiet extremely skillful magic.

The rooms at her show are hushed; viewers stand and look often for extended times. This doesn't often happen.