We went for drinks last night as an office after work to celebrate a co-workers birthday and had a really nice time. We walked down the Embarcadero to Pier 23, which was kind of a div-ey bar, but has a great back deck which looks out on the bay. So we had drinks and shared a bunch of appetizers - fried calemari, fried artichoke hearts, nachos, peel and eat shrimp - it was all delicious. I got to talk to a few more co-workers that I hadn't really had a chance to before, and it was just a really nice, laid-back outing. I was contemplating not going, and my co-worker Linnea talked me into it. I'm really glad I went.
Afterwards, I caught a bus to the SFAI campus to meet Neil for a lecture by a famous painter. Atleast I am told he is famous, I had never heard of him before. :( I don't really do a good job of keeping current on contemporary painters. Anyways. His name is Chris Ofili and he got famous by using elephant dung in his paintings. There was a big uproar in New York a few years ago when Rudy Guiliani denounced his painting of a black virgin Mary that incorporated elephant dung into it. I tried to copy some pictures of his work from the internet, and they came through all blurry, so here are some links to photos of his work if you are interested:
Many more can be found on Google images if you just type in his name. The talk was very interesting and we got a lot of insight into the process he worked through as an artist and the things he was thinking about and struggling with as he made these works of art. Although I haven't heard of any of the artists that are giving lectures at SFAI this fall, I am looking forward to hearing all of them - I think it's so fascinating to get a glimpse into these artists' lives and hear their stories. I always assume that famous artists will be pretentious and condescending, and my experience so far with all of the lecturers to this point is the opposite of that. They are all really normal, down-to-earth people who are not afraid to say that sometimes they weren't sure why they painted something - they just wanted to. It's really refreshing to hear.
We didn't get home from the lecture until 10:00 and then still had to rustle up dinner. We managed to procure some KFC and had dinner at 10:30. Yikes - such a long day and I couldn't wait to climb into bed!!
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