One of the best things Downtown Walnut Creek has accomplished in their art scene is making the electrical utility boxes you see scattered throughout any town look pretty. This is a popular trend in various cities and Walnut Creek has jumped on the bandwagon!
This particular box is in front of Talbot’s on the corner of Main St. and Olympic Blvd., and is a nice piece of work by Mary Anne Kluth. It is called “Master Study, Mount Rosalie,” and was commissioned in 2014.
Kluth was born in Colorado but lives and works in the Bay Area after earning her MFA at the San Francisco Art Institute in 2008. Her piece was installed as a digital print on this box (as many are), but the original work used a hand-cut archival photo collage and acrylic paint to get this sort of apocalyptic, bizarre but beautiful nature painting.
Mount Rosalie of course is located in Colorado and is now called Rosalie Peak. I used to interpret this as a religious interpretation, but now that I have more knowledge about the piece, I want to go back and look at it in more detail. Note: Gott’s Roadside (future blog) opened Thursday. If you end up there, walk a block over and check out Mount Rosalie.
