RMW Ramblings

  The Three Bridges Recent posts took us to two of the three 24 x 18 watercolor paintings I did for Nick Vouras in 2004.  Nick left the choice of three Wilmington scenes up to me.  The original Kozy Korner location at Delaware Ave and Washington St and Holy Trinity church were obvious choices. For the third painting I went to a more widely known Wilmington scene, the three bridges crossing the Brandywine at the north end of Brandywine Park. The rear bridge, the Augustine Bridge, was built in 1883-85 by the Baltimore And Ohio railroad.  It eventually became inadequate for the heavier trains that the B&O had moved to, so the stone arch bridge in the center of our painting was built, opening in 1910.  In 1920 the abandoned B&O metal truss bridge was converted to a vehicular bridge.  The former B&O railroad has since become a component of the CSX rail line. In the foreground is the pedestrian Swinging Bridge.  This bridge was built in 1910 by t...

  Holy Trinity, 2 A print of my painting Holy Trinity , which was the subject of my last posting, was on display at a show I had in 2006.  I was asked by an attendee if I would do a similar painting of Wilmington's Holy Trinity Greek Orthodox Church for him.  I didn't want to do a near-duplicate painting, so I chose a different view of the church and did some rethinking of my encircling Greek folk dancers.  This time I used a combination of aqueous media, both watercolor and acrylic.  This enabled me to introduce metallic pigmented elements. The folk dancers are no longer circling the church, but are entering from the right on a gold background on an uncoiling scroll .  Approaching them from the left are ancient Greek dancers and musicians  By 2006 the metallic cladding was in place on the dome of Holy Trinity Now I could paint the dome in its finished state.  Blue and white pennants announce the annual Holy Trinity Greek festival with festival v...

  Holy Trinity 1 A Movie and a Coke , the subject of my August 31 post, was the first of three 24 x 18 watercolor paintings I did as a commission from Nick Vouras.  The original Kozy Korner restaurant was an obvious choice for this painting.  The subject for the second painting was equally obvious.  Nick had long been active at Holy Trinity Greek Orthodox Church on Wilmington's N Broom St. Since Nick had chaired the annual Greek Festival there several times, I chose to depict the church with festival dancers circling around the church. At the time I did this painting  the church's dome was in an incomplete stage of repair, covered with a black rubber membrane and its future was not then settled.  I presented the dome ambiguously, subject to the viewer's interpretation.  Holy Trinity was built in the late 1940s on the site of the former  Coleman DuPont residence at 808 N Broom St   At the time Mary was living on W 8th St with a backyard ...

  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.