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Be a Guest Curator at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco

© Gretchen Wms. Jurek

I have a confession to make. I have spent untold and uncounted hours in the past couple of days trying to make a keen little Shockwave 8 gallery feature come over here to Suite101 and function here. It is a really interesting technological advance that was letting me - or anyone - make a little virtual gallery in a little virtual room of the really little virtual Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. But, after some two days of trying to move it, I thought I had it, and the bloody thing vanished into the ether! My whole little museum! I HATE IT when that happens!!! I gave up. Technology like that is not my strong suit!

The de Young (in Golden Gate Park) is being rebuilt. The California Palace of the Legion of Honor is farther out toward the beach. http://www.thinker.org/ Both of them suffered major damage in the Loma Prieta earthquake of 1989.

http://geopubs.wr.usgs.gov/dds/dds-29/we...

They are still trying to pull themselves back together, and have joined forces for funding, advertising, all the stuff that museums have to go through. The de Young won't reopen until June of 2005!

I was looking for works by Elmer Bischoff, a Bay Area landscape painter, and tripped over this gold nugget of a site. Together, these two museums have something like 75,000 images of their holdings that we can take a virtual look at! Why was I trying to find some of Bischoff's work? Because I love it.

http://www.absolutearts.com/cgi-bin/news...

This is the second part of my confession. His and Diebenkorn's and later, Thiebaud's and Greg Kondos' work - landscapes and portraits in oils, acrylics (after they were invented), all types of printmaking... I totally love them. Regardless of whether or not it was "popular," I have always painted landscape. There are loads of landscapes and all types of other art here: http://www.thinker.org/gallery/virtualga...

So there you have some hyperlinks to a few of the marvelous images I found. I keep going back over there, since I couldn't move the little virtual museum I made over here to the Suite.

Take a look at Rothko, too, whom I later came to enjoy.

http://www.nga.gov/feature/rothko/rothko...

I kind of think of his work as highly distilled landscape.

When I lived in San Francisco, I was able to go to the museums there, and I always sought out those old landscape artists, the ones I had wanted so much to study with. I still paint landscape. I still love it!