Welcome to my new life

The east side of U.S. Capitol Building in Washington, D.C.

We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time. – T. S. Eliot

On April 22, after 21-plus years of enjoying the landscapes and rhythms of northern California, my wife, Jodi, and I waved goodbye to the San Francisco Bay Area and headed east on Interstate 80. Our final destination? None other than the greater Washington, D.C. area, our new home.

As it happened, over the next week, we drove 2,950.6 miles – covering 13 states starting from California. We crossed the finish line in Maryland on Saturday afternoon, April 29, after beginning the final day of our journey in Morgantown, West Virginia.

Our Passivhaus town home in
Mount Rainier, Maryland.

Our travel week was very busy for us, but one in which we both embraced. After all, we had purchased a brand new house, a Passivhaus town home, in funky Mount Rainier, Maryland, just a couple of short blocks across the District line from Washington and about 15 minutes by car south of the University of Maryland campus in College Park. And, on May 1, my wife began a dream job in research and development at the Library of Congress, which served as the impetus for our leaving California for the Mid-Atlantic east coast.

As we drove across our beautiful and diverse country observing – through the snow-capped Sierra Mountains of California and Nevada, across the massive and great Salt Lake of Utah, alongside the majestic Rocky Mountains of Colorado, across acres and acres of Kansas wheat fields, near the picturesque Gateway Arch of St. Louis, through the Big Ten country of Indiana University in Bloomington, beside the Great American city of Cincinnati and up and down the hilltops of Morgantown – I was reminded often of how Mother Nature often holds up a mirror to us so that we can see more clearly the ongoing processes of growth, of renewal and of transformation in our lives. Our hours and days on the road were also filled with an abundance of music CDs – Pink Martini, Paul Simon, Elvis Costello, Valerie June, Diana Reeves – a variety of NPR podcasts like "Make Me Smart," and we tried to limit our driving to daytime hours so we could rest and renew ourselves at night.

The scenic beauty of the Donner Summit as seen driving
along Interstate 80 through the California Sierra Mountains.

Fortunately, social media and the Internet enable us to stay more easily connected than ever before with family and friends and we still plan to follow and support our favorite Bay Area professional and collegiate sports teams – just from a different city and time zone. So far, we are enjoying the fine public radio offerings from WAMU in Washington, D.C. as well as reading the Washington Post and the national print edition of The New York Times. And, we've learned thanks to the University of Maryland, which won both the men's and women's national championships in lacrosse, that people in this part of the country do take their lacrosse seriously. We've got tickets to see a Washington Nationals baseball game against the San Francisco Giants, and already we've been to a WNBA women's professional basketball game, too. Yes, there's plenty of rich of history and culture that awaits us in and around the nation's capital city, through its many museums and monuments, parks and trails – and I'm sure our free summer weekends will fill up fast with things to see and do. Already, we've explored historic Annapolis (which I'll write more about in the weeks to come) – it's only about 40 minutes away by car – and I'm sure we'll be back, soon.

Our future looks bright – and it doesn't even have anything to do with the abundance of sunshine we've experienced during the past month. Indeed, as the French novelist Marcel Proust once said, "the real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes."

David Hockney: A feeling of liberation in his art

David Hockney / Self portrait with red braces.
Watercolor on paper, 2003.

David Hockney: A Bigger Exhibition, assembled exclusively for the de Young Fine Arts Museum in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park, is both expansive in its scope and monumental in its scale. Think big and you get the picture.

It's the first comprehensive exhibition of David Hockney's 21st-century artwork -- featuring more than 300 works of this celebrated 76-year-old British artist's work shown utilizing 18,000 square feet of gallery space and spread over two floors -- and it includes not only watercolor on paper and oil on canvas, but also iPad drawings and digital movies.

My wife and I happened upon David Hockney: A Bigger Exhibition on a recent Friday evening about three weeks after its opening and we were both impressed by how Hockney's work, which surveys the artist's work from 2002 to present, incorporates both the use of traditional materials and also evolving technologies.

"This exhibition illustrates Hockney's concentration during this period on two genres, portraits and landscapes, in media ranging from the complex technologies used to make the movies to simple pencil and paper," wrote Richard Benefield in the museum's Fine Arts magazine. "Like an artist alchemist, Hockney in one minute uses a modern digital device to make a colorful iPad drawing; in the next he shows us that he is one of our greatest draftsmen by rendering an exactingly detailed charcoal drawing of a forest scene in East Yorkshire."

David Hockney / Yosemite I
iPad drawing printed on paper (6 sheets)
and mounted on Dibond (6 sheets),  2011.

One can't help notice some very larger-than-life paintings -- big picture en plein air landscapes -- assembled on many of the walls throughout the Herbst Exhibition Galleries that were assembled by Hockney's longtime friend and colleague Gregory Evans. Many of these landscapes are grand in their size and include multi-canvas oil paintings and large-scale digital movies that were shot using multiple cameras, some which utilized as many as 18 monitors for their display.

"Not only does he make vivid a startling range of green hues in landscape paintings, but his drawings -- even those made on an iPad -- continually probe for marks, textures and patterns to register nature's details," wrote San Francisco Chronicle art critic Kenneth Baker in his review of the Hockney exhibition.

David Hockney/ Woldgate Woods, 26, 27, & 30 July 2006.
Oil on canvas (6 panels).

There's a little something of everything for everyone and a lot of Hockney goes a long way. It's the largest exhibition ever mounted by the de Young -- much of it is shown chronologically -- and it includes still lifes, portraits and photographic collages. Throughout, Hockney makes use of a wonderful sense of color -- he stirs our emotions through his exuberance for beauty and nature -- and he's a master of modern digital technology.

"Hockney might seem an odd choice for the largest exhibition ever in San Francisco's Fine Arts Museums," wrote Baker. "But on at least two grounds it makes sense: The Bay Area has a deep history of interest in and production of figurative art, and Hockney's work has much to teach us about observation and depiction that links to the long history of art."

David Hockney / Self-portrait with Charlie, 2005. Oil on canvas.
• • •
A Bigger Exhibition / Paintings, works on paper and video.

At the de Young, San Francisco, Oct. 26, 2013-Jan. 20, 2014.

All photographs courtesy of Google images, 2013.