Empty Bowl

Today (28th) was empty bowl day..that should be Empty Bowl. Once a year there is a benefit in our fair city for the food bank. Potters work in a building at Mosier Field, which backs onto Highline High School and the football stadium. Each year these potters make, among other things, hundreds of soup bowls. Several of the restaurants in the area make soup, usually three kinds. People come, pay $15 (up from $10), pick out a bowl, get soup, bread, cheese, cookie and coffee and sit down and eat. When finished the bowl is yours to take home. The crowd was so big last year that they changed the venue to the community center, which is Burien's old library remodeled. Shannon and Mike, our daughter and husband, came in. Jenny, our granddaughter also met up with us. They had to be to work at 2 pm so we did the soup thing for lunch. Last year they had 900 bowls and made $13,000 for the food bank. It should be even better this year. We sat with Merillee Cogswell, who is the managing librarian for the Burien Library and the Highline cluster. That includes several other smaller library branches in the area. Later who should appear out of the blue but Don McQuinn, a local author. I greeted several other people that I know in the community. Anna Jo saw lots of people that she knows through exercising at the community center several times a week. So a good time was had by all.

Picasso Exhibit

Tuesday we finally got to the major exhibit of paintings by Pablo Picasso at the Seattle Art Museum. The paintings were on loan from the Musee International Picasso in Paris. The exhibit was about to close in a few days and the museum was crowded with people like me, who waited until near the end. Tickets were sold for a specific time for entering to prevent overcrowding, staggering the entry times. Still it was crowded enough. I avoid the crowding at the first paintings in the exhibit by going past and picking up the paintings a bit further along and later backtracking to the beginning when the crowd had thinned.

I must say that I am not enamored of Picasso’s work. His early work was representational and I enjoyed seeing works from his blue period and red period and even his cubist period. Once he got beyond that, I was less enthralled. I think I understand what he was trying to do but I’m not sure I care for some of the works for which he is famous. Still, it was a must see exhibit for me, though what little I know of art is self taught. I try to see any major exhibit which comes to Seattle and I have visited many art museums on my travels, both here and in England. I particularly love the Impressionists, French and American.

Our daughter and son-in-law accompanied us to the exhibit. We were all worried a bit about the weather. Snow had been forecast for the evening commute time. We were fortunate to get home before the snow, which came a bit later than anticipated. It snowed several inches but was gone by noon the next day.