Art Town: Master Study, Mount Rosalie

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.

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Art Town: I’m Your Puppet

Walnut Creek has been doing a really cool utility box painting project for a few years, and they’ve recently changed some of their art for 2017. You can see more information on the program and recent additions here, but we’ll be including some in Art Town moving forward.

This one is called “I’m Your Puppet” by Jennifer Bain and covers the utility box on the corner of Newell and Main. Check it out!

Art Town: Lost in the Mail

A fixture of the downtown Walnut Creek art scene since 1985, Jacques Overhoff’s “Lost in the Mail” sits on the corner of Civic and Main, across the way from the police station.

If you’ve ever grabbed a coffee at La Scala or strolled from Stadium Pub to Dan’s on a weekend night, you’ve passed this ceramic sculpture.

Overhoff, a Dutch artist, named this piece after the plans to assemble it literally got lost in the mail.

The design is supposed to be texture-focused and allow for softening and hardening of the features depending on the angle of the sun.

According to the Walnut Creek Arts Commissioner, some people believe the sculpture looks like a pizza with two slices taken out of it. I personally see some sort of decaying sun dial, but to each his or her own!