Art sampling, wine tasting

Wanda and Marianne slept in this morning, so Richard and Chris went out to the garage to look at tools. Richard and Chris are both of the same mind here: a man cannot have too many tools.

Chris was particularly interested in Richard's home made English wheels. Both are small as E-wheels go. The first is a unique configuration that allows wheeling closed pieces because the upper and lower wheels are supported from horizontal arms that are axial to the wheels.The two arms are hinged, and a bolt between the two arms allows pressure on the wheels to be adjusted.

The slightly larger E-wheel is more conventional, but still unique in that the screw for adjusting the pressure on the wheels acts on the upper wheel rather than the lower.

Wanda joined us in the garage as we looked at Richard's welders - TIG, MIG, stick and Oxy-acetylene. He also has a plasma cutter and a large collection of electric and air powered tools with a substantial air compressor to power the latter.
Once a rock climber Richard now has an interest white water rafting with several canoes hanging from his workshop ceiling. Marianne' interests include bridge and quilting. Several of her finely sewn pieces grace the walls of their home.

This weekend more than 100 Boulder artists were holding an open studio event where the public could view a sample of their work in a joint exhibition at the Boulder Library, and then visit their studios.

We went first to visit a friend of Richard's, Doug Green, who does the most exquisite parquetry.


He demonstrated the secret of his art, which involves large quantities of masking tape, a saw table with an inbuilt lean and some extremely fine saw blades.

From there we proceeded to the library to view the art exhibition.

Brian Grossman's colorado alabaster.

William Stoehr's work.

We picked three artisits to visit, and as it happened Richard knew them all. First we stopped at Matt Cohn's studio. He is a wood turner who does some extremely delicate work prodicing wooden vessels with remarkably thin walls.

Matt Cohn's delicate woodwork.

When we spoke with Matt Cohn he told us he had been to Canberra, and had even visited the Bungendore Woodworks Gallery when he did a trip to Australia and NewZealand to study with master wood turners. We asked if he was familiar with such timbers as Huon Pine and Kauri, and were not really surprised to find a shelf with samples of many Australian and New Zealand timders that he had collected on his trip. Chris took a quick lesson in wood turning before we all moved on to the next studio.

At the next studio we met Susan Erikson. She too was familiar with Canberra, having studied Earth Sciences at the Australian National University in Canberra. What a small world we live in!

Susan's work draws heavily on her geology background with layers of patterned strips referencing strata in the rocks and earth.

Our last studio visit was to meet Cha Cha, who works in ceramics and steel. She has a collection of whimsical and imaginary birds as well as works in steel. Her studio has a large iron working shop behind it with forges, anvils, power hammers and so on. Obviously other people work there, for we saw all manner of gates and railings in different stages of assembly.

Leaving Cha Cha's we make a quick trip to a shoe store so Wanda could replace her worn out sneakers.

One of the incentives for staying an extra day with Richard and Marianne (apart from enjoying their company and hospitality) was that they had been invited to a blind wine tasting being organised by Margot, a friend and benefactor of the College of Music. The event was a fundraiser for the college, and we were invited to go along, too.

The wine tasting was organised by a very knowledgeable man who owned a liquor store and was a sommelier. He spoke about how wine is evaluated at tastings and invited everyone to participate in the discussion relating to each of the four wines. This led to a merry night.

Eliza, Margot(the hostess for the night) and Kathleen.

Marianne, Rosemary and Harriet.

After the formal tasting we chatted with other guests there and finished off the food and wine. They had somehow all heard we were motorcycling around the US and were most interested to hear about that. We returned to Richard and Marianne's and chatted late into the night over another boittle of wine.