RMW Ramblings

  Another Wilmington Relocated Statue Admiral Samuel F. Du Pont President James Garfield is not the only personage whose statue was relocated in Wilmington.  In 1884 Admiral Samuel F. Du Pont (his spelling) was memorialized by the dedication of statue in Washington, DC.  The statue, by sculptor Launt Thompson, was erected in Washington's Pacific Circle, renamed Dupont Circle (the official DC spelling). Here it is in 1900 [https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/47/Dupont_Circle_1900.png]. A Washington Post column from 2015 gives more of the story. https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/before-there-was-a-fountain-in-dupont-circle-there-was-a-statue-an-ugly-one/2015/12/12/cbf0d08c-a04a-11e5-8728-1af6af208198_story.html In 1917 the statue was removed and transported to Wilmington, replaced by the more imposing fountain also commemorating Admiral Du Pont, designed by Daniel Chester French and Henry Bacon. The statue now is a neighbor of mine.  It marks the Tower...

Delaware Ave and Washington St A Changing Scene In our last post, you saw the intersection of Delaware Ave and Washington St as it looked in the 1950s. The Atlantic gas station dates to the 1920s.  The classical Greek style "pavilion," the original facility, was probably designed by the architect Joseph F Kunz, who did many service station designs for Atlantic Refining Co., many in this classical style, as told in a blog no longer available on-line.   The utilitarian vitreous enameled panel structure was a later addition.  In my memory, in the 1950s the Greek pavilion housed the restrooms.  When the gas station was razed in 1964, the Greek pavilion was acquired by Chick Laird, a well-known local philanthropist, and donated to Tatnall School on Barley Mill Road, near the now-residence of President Joe Biden. It was repurposed as an open air structure and still stands on the grounds of the Tatnall School campus. The intersection has even more recently been rebuilt and...

  A Movie and a Coke The Kozy Korner The Kozy Korner was a restaurant that was opened in by John Vouras at the corner of Delaware Ave. and Washington Streets, Wilmington in 1922.  Later it was run by his son Nick until 1985 when the building was demolished for a hotel construction.  In 1991 Nick re-established the Kozy on Union St.  After my retirement in 1995 I frequently joined Mary with here mom there for breakfast.  At some point I gave Nick a print of my 2002 18 x 24 watercolor painting commemorated both the opening of Rockford Tower a hundred years earlier and the 2002 re-opening of the observation deck which had been closed for years.  Later Nick asked me to paint three watercolors of the same size of local subjects of my choice.  The original Kozy Korner was an obvious subject for my first painting, A Movie and a Coke."  I chose to do a 1950s high angle view down Delaware Ave with the Kozy on the right and other landmarks of that time vis...

  Testing MetaAI Leonardo Dreams of Flight Meta, the parent of Facebook, is now promoting an artificial intelligence service, MetAI.  It invites you to ask it to "imagine" a scene in response to your description.  I wondered how it would respond to the title of one of my own paintings.  I picked Leonardo Dreams of Flight. I depicted Leonardo di Vinci in reverie with flight related images from his notebooks swirling around his head and birds swirling over the city of Florence.   MetaAI gave me four imag es.  Three were very similar, static pictures with Leonard looking on his flight drawings, but one was different:   This angelically winged Leonardo with a dreamy  look is a completely different approach than I took.  The detail and color choices are impressive. I clicked on the "animate" button for this image and was disappointed that the wings didn't move, only Leonardo's head.

  Performing Arts A few days ago I was revisiting a small painting that occasionally hangs in my library,  Performing Arts shows a titmouse "performing" in front of the Ursuline Academy Performing Arts Center.   The classical building was originally the First Church of Christ Scientist, designed by Solon S. Beman in 1912.  Beman was Mary Baker Eddy's "go to" architect as she expanded the church she founded.  I painted the picture in 2010 and was now curious what Ursuline has done with it since. I found that UA had just announced plans for renovating the building and grounds.  https://delawarelive.com/ursuline-plans-performing-arts-community-space/ The project will need about eight to ten million dollars, presenting "naming opportunities" for donors.  The imposing structure stands at the edge of Cool Springs Park at the head of Park Place.  It is one of Wilmington's architectural gems.  

  A Miniature Garden Going through my eclectic assortment of frames, I found a little set of tiny unfinished wood frames I bought on a whim at Ikea several years ago.  The openings are only two inches high.  I cut little panels to fit and painted them with a ground coat of ultramarine blue and tinted the frames with metallic gold paint.  The stylized flowers were done with a fine point gold paint marker and an assortment of cheap nail polish, five dollars for the set from Five Below. The flowers are based loosely on ancient Greek decorative motifs.   I had started to  paint flowers in this style when painting The Secret Garden , the subject of my July 21 post ( https://rmw-ramblings.blogspot.com/2024/07/over-mantle-secret-garden.htm) but abandoned the idea because the contrast was poor on my copper-toned ground.  Here's a detail before I painted over... Several years ago I used the same style in a detail in the group  Erodios ( https://rmw-ramblin...

  Heron Redux Painted yesterday, Heron Redux is 4 x 6 inches acrylic on canvasboard.  Mary commented that I paint a lot of herons.  That remark inspired the title.