A Visit to St. Mary’s College Museum of Art

St. Mary’s College in Moraga had two great landscape art shows* that I attended a month or so ago. After I visited the museum I tried sketching their chapel. I had to draw quickly while fighting off wasps that were buzzing around me and kept landing on my bright yellow Lamy Safari pen.

When I started sketching the chapel in the two pictures above, what interested me were the interesting shadows but by the time I finished drawing and was ready to paint, the shadows were mostly gone. I wasn’t having a great sketching day and struggled a bit with both of these.

It’s an interesting campus, very quiet and serene with well-scrubbed, polite students, very different from other Bay Area colleges where diversity and tattoos are the norm. On the hours the bells ring out a very dirge-like sound which seemed out of place.

*The two art shows included “The Nature of Collecting, The Early 20th Century Fine Art Collection of Roger Epperson.” Epperson was a park ranger who over 30 years collected more than 300 museum-quality California landscape paintings by shopping at antique stores, flea markets, garage sales and online. The other show was “Richard Gayton: One Square Mile in California.” I especially loved seeing his sketches and annotations in his journals of the local wildlife and his experiences drawing them within the one square mile in Mt. Diablo State Park.