Cecile and I had dinner with our friends Susan and Nelson Bye at The Basin restaurant in Saratoga, that has been owned and operated by Andrew Welch since 2000. The restauranteur is known to work the floor almost every night. His core tenet is “giving with love.” We enjoyed a mixed beet salad with arugula, scallops with rice, the Basin Liver & Onions with Italian bacon, sautéed spinach, garlic in a sweet red wine jus.
After dinner, we drove to West Valley College to catch a shuttle to the Montalvo Arts Center for an enchanting evening attending the exhibition of London born Bruce Munro "Stories in Light." An absolute master in illumination, the artist made use of Montalvo grounds as his canvas to lead visitors on a journey of wonder and visionary discovery. His works are inspired by C.S. Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia.
There are ten light-based works. One of our favorite exhibits were: "Gathering of the Clans," a work inspired by Munro’s time spent in Australia and being awakened by a cacophony of cockatoos. The artist uses fluorescent, die-cut, stylized clothespins on a two-tiered Australian clothesline. He incorporated ultraviolet light to illuminate each clothespin cut from fluorescent acrylic in a color scheme that represents each species of cockatoo. We also liked "Light Shower" that showcases the ideal droplet shape held by a plethora of fiber optic strands that descend from a circular ceiling casing that peaks out of the bead-representing sunlight caught in the drop. Then there is "Ramadu’s Table," mixed media including 25 DMX Lights and a field of a 1000 white flamingoes that changes color. The artist received the iconic pink plastic flamingo as a gift from his father who had just returned from the United States and was a source of fascination throughout his childhood. It is an homage to Don Featherstone, the designer of the original pink lawn flamingo.
What especially caught my attention in the historic structure at the base of Montalvo’s Italianate Garden—a site known as the Love Temple is an ornate marble fountain surrounded by four identical gargoyles. Munro chose this as the location in which the ever-flowing fountain (of wine) in celebration of Bacchus, the god of wine from which my first name Dennis has its origin, in Roman mythology. The Greek variant is Dionysius.
Postscript: As a former watercolorist with the Saratoga Community of Painters for many years, the expansive Montalvo grounds was an idyllic spot, not only for plein air watercolor painting with my fellow artists but as a sanctuary of peace. Back in the day, we had a showing of our collective works in the Carriage House. To witness the visionary large scale light-based works of Bruce Munro under the wide and starry sky was something to behold.
