Day 5: Rochester (and Post #401)

Day 5: Rochester

Weather:  Pretty in morning, starting to get overcast in afternoon, very (almost non-existent) light drizzle in early evening yielding to very calm and maybe 70

Pics: In and around Rochester

QOTD:  

It comes down to reality
And it's fine with me 'cause I've let it slide
Don't care if it's Chinatown or on Riverside
I don't have any reasons
I've left them all behind
I'm in a New York state of mind

Where we had dinner last night, in Strathallam

Skipped this morning

During walk

Awful cookies

Classy, not good

No indication of which is 2% and which is skim

A decent breakfast

Local paper

The buttons on ground floor, or two out of three buttons on ground floor; which is up? Is the middle one neutral?

Outside Albert Paley's studio/factory

Park Ave mock-ups

Work for sale

Paper maquettes

Jennifer, Sales and Marketing manager, between first maquette and second maquette for same piece

Works on paper, only available directly from Albert's office

What is Albert reading?

The studio/factory floor

Albert

Jennifer and Albert

Plenty of hammers

Old style

Frances Paley

THB's lunch

Christina Brinkman

Lake Ontario

Leonard Urso work

Schnitzel and warm potato salad

The real thing

It is so nice out, we decide to walk for about an hour in the area around the hotel. Breakfast at the hotel, THB has mini-wheats and strawberries, a revelation after cold French toast. THB also stops on the way back from the walk and picks up some Classy Cookies. Awful….

Our first visit is at the studio/manufacturing site of Albert Paley, a famous metal sculptor who started by making jewelry and moved on to (literally) bigger things. His Sales and Marketing manager (this is a big organization) gives us a tour and then on the factory floor Albert stops to give us 20 minutes or so on his background and answers questions. As we’re leaving, his wife, Frances, drives up. She’s also an artist, large photographs taken in NY and Paris, digitally enhanced. Six months out of the year they work/live out of Big Sur, and Frances says they would move to Oakland if they could move the construction site, she loves eating on College and Piedmont Avenues.

For the second visit of the morning, we visit the collectors Shirley and Chip Dawson. They tried downsizing to a townhouse, three years ago moved again to a reconstructed house (most material recycled from old barns) and installed a lot of work that they had collected over many years (Shirley ran a gallery for many years) and much of the work is folk art mixed with other fine art/furniture.

Lunch is at Dinosaur BBQ: THB has a Southern Tier Double Pale Ale along with a pulled pork/brisket platter with cole slaw and collard greens (included), pretty decent (and the people that had ribs were very happy, too).

The first visit of the afternoon is a two-fer: Christina Brinkman is a porcelain artist who also lives in a gorgeous spot on Lake Ontario with a great collection of mostly local artists. She has a studio In a separate apartment across from the house and another in the main house (this woman also spends time in Florida – aka winter – and works non-stop there too). Overlaps with THB and DB’s collection include work by Cybelle Young and Christina Bothwell. Many paintings by Robert Marx, so many that THB asks Christina if anyone else has his work. The upstairs “view” room looking out over Lake Ontario is a special spot.

Last group visit of the day is to jewelry artist Myung Urso and metal artist Leonard Urso (also teaches at RIT). DB already owns work by Myung, and manages to find more to own. We’ll see Leonard again at Rochester Institute of Technology. To see his work in perspective, THB has included a couple of pictures from a past trip.

Dinner at Tavern 58 With D&M; we met on our trip to India in 2009 and have been meeting up ever since, sometimes locally in the Bay Area and sometimes on the Oakland trips (eg, KC and Crystal Bridges, Japan for DB).  Tavern  is close enough the hotel shuttles us both ways. THB has the schnitzel and most of a Rorhbach’s Scotch Ale and DB has a green salad and crab cakes and bubbly water with mint, $56.