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National Geographic
30-05-2025
- National Geographic
10 places to stay while you're at Yosemite National Park
Yosemite National Park welcomes approximately four million visitors every year. Not surprisingly, travelers from around the world are drawn to the 748,000 acres of natural beauty which include Yosemite Valley, Half Dome, El Capitan, Glacier Point, numerous waterfalls, and Mariposa Grove, where visitors can walk through a giant sequoia. With so much to see and do, visitors to the national park should consider finding a home base nearby to allow enough time for a multi-day adventure to explore. Outdoor enthusiasts looking for an ideal place to stay should check into these 10 places to stay in and near Yosemite National Park, each offering something for every type of traveler. (Related: Here's everything to know about Yosemite National Park.) 1. The Ahwahnee, Yosemite Valley Best for: Architecture lovers Built in 1927 and designed by Gilbert Stanley Underwood, the Ahwahnee is a stellar example of National Park Rustic Architecture, fondly called 'parkitecture' by park service staff. This style involves using stonework and concrete, disguised as wood, to help buildings visually melt into nature. The Ahwahnee sits at the base of a sheer granite cliff, and its interiors include Native American designs on tiles and stenciling, 34-foot windows with views of Half Dome, and an astonishing amalgam of Art Deco, Arts & Crafts, and Middle Eastern styles found in its furnishings, rugs, beams, and fireplaces. 'We're running a hotel out of a museum,' says front desk manager Cole Estrada. Good to know: For more privacy, guests can elect to forego the main lodge in favor of small cottages in the forest. 2. Château du Sureau, Oakhurst Best for: European luxury Referencing Versailles may be putting it too boldly, but this five-star resort is an opulent sprawl. Guestrooms open with an iron key, and each has beautiful textiles and antique furnishings that evoke the French countryside. Instead of a lobby, Château du Sureau has a grand sitting room with a library, where guests can play games, read, or play the piano. It's a half hour from the South Gate, well worth the drive to be enveloped in luxury. Good to know: The on-site restaurant, the Elderberry House, is helmed by head chef Ethan de Graaf and showcases an exquisite three- or five-course tasting menu. Serving French cuisine with Japanese and American influences, the restaurant's must-try menu items include a red wine demi-glace that takes two days to prepare and is served on most entrées. Other favorites include the Brandt Farm ribeye and the cherry wood old fashioned are favorites. The latter is served with a tableside presentation of releasing the trapped cherry wood smoke infused into the drink; its orange oleo ingredient is prepped ahead of time and sits for several days marinating. (Related: Discover the best day hikes in Yosemite National Park.) 3. Yosemite View Lodge, El Portal Best for: Tranquility Located a five-minute drive from Yosemite's Arch Rock entrance, Yosemite View Lodge provides a serene setting where guests can sit on the balcony and hear the calming sounds of the Merced River which runs through the property. If possible, book a river view room on the ground floor to be mere inches from the water. It's a priceless experience. Good to know: If you can't score a river view room, bask in one of seven on-site hot tubs with mountain views to relax your hike-weary body. 4. Firefall Ranch, Groveland Best for: Families Opened in May 2024, this newer hotel located a half hour from the Big Oak Flat entrance is a goldmine for families. Firefall Ranch's outdoor heated pool is open 24 hours, a boon for active kids (and sleepless adults). Individual cabins encircle a frog-laden pond, and on-site amenities and activities include a mini golf course, climbing wall, nightly s'mores, and guided art activities to keep kids busy. According to the property's General Manager Joe Juszkiewicz, the ranch started offering horseback riding on its extensive acreage in April. Good to know: For a family activity that merges nature and sports, try the ranch's forest disc golf course. It features 18 holes across 300 acres. As the hotel's name alludes, a seasonal package in February called the Firefall Express brings guests into Yosemite to see the Firefall phenomenon where a portion of El Capitan appears to be aflame; other excursions can be booked as well. (Related: These are the 10 most popular national parks.) 5. Sierra Sky Ranch, Oakhurst Best for: History and ghost lovers The 150-year-old Sierra Sky Ranch has a long history and ghosts. This was once California's largest cattle ranch with 4,000 head of cattle but it also served other purposes over the years. It housed tuberculosis patients, and after World War II, it became a rest home for shell-shocked U.S. servicemen. With such a varied history, the ranch has become the permanent home to guests who can't seem to 'check out,' including farmhand Elmer and Sarah, a nurse from the sanatorium days. Ask at the front desk to review the book with previous guests' handwritten ghost encounters. You might end up adding a 'ghost-encounter' entry before leaving this historic ranch. Good to know: Your drive to the South Gate entrance is only 20 minutes. Stop halfway to visit the Yosemite Mountain Sugar Pine Railroad for a scenic ride on a whistling steam locomotive through the Sierra National Forest. 6. Lodge at Tenaya, Fish Camp Best for: Rustic elegance At the Lodge at Tenaya, just six minutes from the South Gate, the luxurious lobby boasts a lofty ceiling and elaborate iron chandeliers with dozens of tapers, borrowing vibes from the 'parkitecture' era even though the lodge was built in 1990. People gather near the impressive stone fireplace to play chess and chat with strangers. Ascent, The Spa at Tenaya upscales the experience with a relaxation lounge, steam and sauna rooms, and complimentary yoga classes. Good to know: Guests can book a private cottage or, better yet, an Explorer Cabin with exclusive golf cart use, views of the nearby creek, meadow, or pond, and access to the Explorer Clubhouse with complimentary snacks and wine. Explorer Cabin #41 is completely solar-powered. (Related: See what national parks in the United States first looked like.) 7. Yosemite Valley Lodge, Yosemite Valley Best for: Access to the continent's highest waterfall The motel-style rooms at the Yosemite Valley Lodge are clean and serviceable but dated—but that's negligible considering you're an easy walk to Yosemite Falls, North America's highest waterfall. With three separate drops, it plunges 2,245 feet and is visible and audible from the lodge. Good to know: This is also the closest lodge to the seasonal Firefall phenomenon; you can walk 40 minutes, drive five minutes, or take the free shuttle to the El Capitan picnic area for optimum viewing. 8. Curry Village, Yosemite Valley Best for: Valley views Guests staying at the historic Curry Village (1899) will have a stunning view of Half Dome and Sentinel Dome. It features 424 tent cabins (wooden framework with white canvas stretched over it), providing an interesting hybrid of cabin and tent, or choose from 46 traditional cabins or 18 motel rooms. Curry Village offers guests immediate sightlines to waterfalls, meadows, and dramatic rock faces. Good to know: In winter, a skating rink goes up for the thrill of carving ice under the majestic rise of granite cliffs. (Related: Avoid the crowds at the 10 least-visited U.S. national parks.) 9. Hotel Charlotte, Groveland Best for: Exploring a historic town Charlotte DeFerrari was an enterprising immigrant from Italy who built this 1921 National Register hotel 30 minutes from the Big Oak Flat entrance. Groveland is the quintessential Gold Rush town with a mercantile store that serves ice cream, a tiny jail (1895) no longer in use, and the Groveland Yosemite Gateway Museum. The Hotel Charlotte is across the street from the Iron Door Saloon (1852), said to be the oldest saloon in California. Good to know: Plan a picnic and spend the day at Rainbow Pool, located 10 minutes away from Hotel Charlotte. Fed by a small mountain stream, this swimming hole was originally a stagecoach stop. Adventurous travelers can go whitewater rafting on the Tuolumne River where the gold rushers once plied for gold. The Tuolumne boasts 40 rapids in an 18-mile stretch. Outfitters, such as Sierra Mac River Trips and Arta River Trips, can arrange your whitewater voyage. 10. Yosemite Bug Rustic Mountain Resort, Midpines Best for: A social California vibe 'Berkeley' meets Yosemite at the hillside Yosemite Bug Rustic Mountain Resort, which began in the 1930s as a Boy Scout camp. This casual spot 25 minutes from the Arch Rock entrance offers stilt cabins, hotel-style rooms, youth hostel bunk bedrooms, glamping tent cabins, and the Starlite House, a rustic space with a 1970s hippie vibe that sleeps seven people. Guests who don't know each other can slide into the communal 10-person stainless steel tub, visit the cedar-walled sauna, join a yoga session, and eat together in this spot that feels like a European hostel with a California vibe. Good to know: At the spa, the 'hiker's massage treatment' dials back stiffness from climbing Vernal Fall or any of Yosemite's strenuous hikes. The spa has many sets of stairs, so guests who may have issues walking or have other physical challenges should let the resort know when booking an appointment. Erika Mailman is a northern California-based writer who covers art, architecture, and travel. Follow her on Instagram.
Vancouver Sun
12-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Vancouver Sun
Dan Mangan brightens up dark times with new album Natural Light
Natural Light is the seventh album by Vancouver-based musician Dan Mangan. Due out on Arts & Crafts this week, the album was recorded at Toronto producer Jason Haberman's southern Ontario cottage, dubbed Souvenir. A photo of the makeshift studio in the front room of the cabin also became the cover art. The release is the first album that Mangan and his touring band of multi-instrumentalists Haberman, Mike O'Brien and Don Kerr recorded together. The singer admits the purpose of the cabin sessions was to workshop old ideas, develop new ones and treat it all as a zero-pressure preparation for future studio sessions in Los Angeles with a different producer and backing players. It became clear during the process that something else was taking place. Get top headlines and gossip from the world of celebrity and entertainment. By signing up you consent to receive the above newsletter from Postmedia Network Inc. A welcome email is on its way. If you don't see it, please check your junk folder. The next issue of Sun Spots will soon be in your inbox. Please try again Interested in more newsletters? Browse here. In the same way that Blue Rodeo's classic Five Days in July came out of the no-pressure cabin sessions that became the title, Natural Light could have been six days in May. 'There are a lot of things in my life I feel I really worked hard and sweated for, but this was the most serendipitous, joyful and creative experience I've ever had,' said Mangan. 'Some of these songs have been ruminating for a while, getting hummed in the shower and being extremely considered down to the choices of consonants, melody, etc. But the execution of them as a recording was unplanned and barely discussed. It's just a gift.' The album opens with It Might Be Raining, a surprisingly rare reference to our frequent weather by a Vancouver artist. The casually strummed ode to navigating the 'oceans of bull s—' that we are all up against is a perfect beginning to the 13-track recording. It shimmers with an emotional intensity juxtaposed against the kind of easy-flowing instrumentation that hearkens back to gems such as Van Morrison's Astral Weeks. 'It Might Be Raining was a new song I was excited about and the first song we did three takes and — boom — locked it away,' he said. 'Suddenly, everyone is going, 'Holy crap, that went well.' And the second day we did two songs, day three was four, and so on. When you go into a major studio like The Warehouse and everything you do is bleeding money, this was the opposite. Because we thought we weren't recording a record.' Right up until the very end of the sessions, this casual approach imbued the recording and the results were something Mangan has never experienced before. By the end of the week, it was obvious they had made a record. 'Personally, emotionally, I've never experienced that kind of total detachment from any result and it was blissful,' he said. 'I think it is a high point of my whole career. Even going back and adding some horns and strings, this whole time, I've been revelling in the experience.' Orchestral contributions came from composer Jesse Zubot, who previously recorded and toured with Mangan's big band Blacksmith. These kept in the spirit of the initial sessions, as songs such as the lead single Melody and My Dreams Are Getting Weirder are all filled with a glorious vibe of open space. The latest advance track, Diminishing Returns, may be the first pop single to reference the global climate crisis. Mangan notes the irony of having the third lead-up number to a major album being titled Diminishing Returns. He sadly reflects that the refrain of 'one place underwater, another burns, no one is surprised, but everyone is shocked' came from watching news reports on a U.S. tour leg where the West Coast was on fire and the East Coast was flooded due to hurricanes. It's one of the best songs on Natural Light. 'We're all up against it, going on with our day-to-day robotic lives like it's business as usual and planning ahead, still presuming that it's all going to be here,' he said. 'Meanwhile, doomscrolling at midnight, you're asking, 'What are we up against?' I reflect on these things and the real issues that people are facing and how you can arrive somewhere positive.' A founder of the Side Door Access booking platform to improve independent musicians touring opportunities and revenue generation, he is well aware of the personal pressure to keep positive about the modern music industry. At the time of this interview, Mangan note he is still embracing the joy of creating Natural Light before the coming business of releasing records comes into play. Then, things get serious for artists facing severe fiscal challenges. 'Every day that draws closer to the actual release date and it becoming a quantifiable marketplace product, I brace for the other side of all this bliss,' he said. 'It can or can't do well, and could be a case of so many years of my life having people react with 'So, what else are you working on?' But the coming shows will be incredible, because everyone in this band makes music together so naturally and gets along so well. Our band text stream is titled FLG, for F—in' Love You Guys.' Many dates on the fall tour in support of Natural Light have been announced already, including an Oct. 3 date at the Vogue Theatre with opener Bells Larsen. The all-ages show is already sold out. sderdeyn@
New York Times
04-04-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Ruth Asawa's Astonishing Universe Began at Her Door
If you passed through the unlocked gate and rambling garden into Ruth Asawa's Noe Valley home between 1966 and 2000, the 5-foot-tall Japanese American artist would likely have persuaded you to lie down on the kitchen table or living room floor and let her cover your face in plaster. Ethereal clusters of her undulating, looped-wire sculptures would have dangled from the rafters of the cathedral ceiling while her six children, and later 10 grandchildren, ran underfoot. 'Ruthie could get people to do very bizarre things — because to have your face cast is a completely intimate act,' said Addie Lanier, one of Asawa's five surviving children. Addie's son, Henry Weverka, who also had his hands and feet cast by his grandmother throughout childhood, and now oversees her estate, added, 'She said she liked capturing a moment in time.' In the last 35 years of the 20th century, inspired by a Life magazine essay picturing Roman masks and busts, Asawa cast the faces of at least 600 people. They included neighborhood children as well as her mentor, the visionary architect Buckminster Fuller, an influential teacher at Black Mountain College in North Carolina in the late 1940s and to Albert Lanier, the 6-foot-5 architecture student from Georgia whom she met and married while studying there. Asawa, who died in 2013 at age 87, hung her ever-expanding constellation of life masks on the ceder-shingled facade of their Arts & Crafts style home in a dramatically inclusive gesture of welcome. 'If she asked you to do something, no one ever said no,' said Andrea Jepson, Asawa's former neighbor who let the artist cast her whole body shortly after giving birth in 1967 as the model for 'Andrea,' a bronze mermaid fountain in San Francisco's Ghirardelli Square. Jepson recalls the house being 'filled with other people all the time. Nothing was compartmentalized.' On the eve of Asawa's first posthumous retrospective, opening April 5 at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Addie and Henry joined Paul Lanier, Asawa's youngest child, who now lives in the family home, for a personal tour of Asawa's creative universe, where artmaking, family life and community activism flowed together. The house is nested within a garden created by Albert. 'A lot of times she worked right here,' Paul said, pointing to a discreet hook at the center of a double-wide door frame between the living room and kitchen, where Asawa would hang her looped-wire works in process. She used a knit stitch by hand, which she learned from a local wire-basket maker on a 1947 trip to Mexico, to draw in space and define volumes with a continuous line of pliable copper, brass or steel. 'She could sit, or she might have to lie down,' Paul said, as the scale of her curvaceous forms grew, adding that it was a convenient spot to monitor what was cooking for dinner. At the long butcher block kitchen table built by Albert, Asawa led group sessions sculpting figures from homemade baker's clay (a mixture of flour, salt and water), or decorating eggs or making origami by day and family meals by night. 'The most important thing to this family was that we sat down to dinner together every single night,' Asawa once told an interviewer. 'There were eight of us at the table, plus friends.' The retrospective, organized with the Museum of Modern Art in New York, where it travels this fall, will emphasize the Noe Valley home and garden as the center of Asawa's world, said Janet Bishop, the exhibition's co-curator and SFMOMA's chief curator. A gallery at the museum will display an array of Asawa's life masks adjacent to a set of redwood doors — formerly installed at the home's entrance. These majestic doors were hand-carved in 1961 by Asawa and family members with a stylized wave pattern, echoing Black Mountain assignments that explored a meandering line. The exhibition will also shine a light on Asawa's public artworks, including in San Francisco's Union Square, Embarcadero and Japantown that are not widely known outside the city, and on her fierce advocacy for integrating art into the city's public schools. A local legend, Asawa nonetheless had zero visibility in the broader art world during her lifetime. She was rejected all four times that she applied for a Guggenheim fellowship. But as distinctions between art and craft have dissolved and artists long overlooked because of their race or gender are being reappraised, Asawa's looped-wire forms have been widely acclaimed for transforming a utilitarian material and innovating on techniques that added buoyancy and transparency in sculpture. 'She's become a darling within the museum world and also with younger artists sharing images of her work all over social media,' said Jonathan Laib, director at the David Zwirner Gallery, which has mounted four solo Asawa exhibitions since 2017, regularly selling out. In 2023, the Whitney Museum and Menil Collection organized the first Asawa exhibition to examine the primacy of drawings in her practice, influenced by the former Bauhaus teacher and artist Josef Albers at Black Mountain. Laib had never heard of Asawa until he was working at Christie's in 2008 and received a cold call from Asawa's daughter Addie. She was interested in selling an Albers painting, a gift he inscribed to her mother, to raise money to provide the 24-hour care she needed late in life. 'That Albers painting at the time was really the only artwork of value that the family had,' said Laib, who was stunned by images Addie sent of Asawa's sculptures and quickly flew to San Francisco to see them in person. In 2010, Laib put a six-lobed, multilayered hanging wire sculpture from the late '60s, consigned by Asawa's family, in a Christie's sale alongside artists she showed with at New York's Peridot Gallery in the 1950s, including Philip Guston and Louise Bourgeois. 'I wanted to reinsert her into the conversation,' Laib said. It sold for $578,500, with more than 30 bidders, smashing Asawa's previous auction high of under $100,000. 'It kicked off what we see now, which is just a complete transformation of her presence in the art world,' said Laib, who brought her estate to Zwirner in 2017. He estimated that the sculpture today would be insured for at least $8 million. Laib also brokered the private sale to SFMOMA of a circa 1958 sculpture in the months after Asawa's death, enabling Paul to keep their Noe Valley home. (His siblings all live within a mile.) Bishop, the curator, said the piece is her favorite in the museum's collection, noting that such works were described dismissively by one critic early on as 'earrings for a giraffe.' In 1956, the critic Dore Ashton wrote in The New York Times, 'They are beautiful if primarily only decorative objects in space.' The Portuguese sculptor Leonor Antunes, who often uses wire in her work, found a visit to Asawa's Noe Valley home inspirational while she was working on her own 2016 installation for SFMOMA. 'It was quite extraordinary to imagine her working within her family context and weaving in space with this hard material that has its own memory,' Antunes said. 'It's not elastic. You have to be very persistent in creating the kind of even structures that she did.' Addie described her mother's 'relentless' hands. 'She was exhausting as a mother because her energy was so profound,' said Addie, who would coil wire for her or feed her two lengths at a time for the branching forms she began making in 1962, modeled on a desert plant. 'But she didn't ask you to do anything she wasn't doing,' she added. 'We were workers on the farm.' Asawa's life started on a farm southwest of Los Angeles where she was one of seven children of Japanese immigrant parents. She and her siblings did farm work before and after school, in early morning, late nights and on Sundays. Saturdays they studied Japanese, including calligraphy. 'We used to make patterns in the dirt, hanging our feet off the horse-drawn farm equipment,' Asawa told an interviewer in 2001. 'We made endless hourglass figures that I now see as the forms within the forms in my crocheted wire sculptures.' In 1942, two months after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Asawa, age 16, and her family were among more than 120,000 people of Japanese descent — mostly American citizens — held by the government in internment camps. For six months, Asawa slept in a horse stall at a converted racetrack in Santa Anita, Calif., and was tutored for six hours a day by three detained Disney animators who taught the children how to draw. 'You have to say for her it was a mixed blessing,' Addie said. Asawa was transferred to Rohwer, Ark., where Quakers running the relocation camp let her continue her education at Milwaukee State Teachers College, and she learned about the interdisciplinary utopian college in Black Mountain. Beginning there in 1946, she met Albert 'on a mountain path,' he recalled in 2002. In a 1948 letter to him, Asawa called herself a 'citizen of the universe,' refusing to be defined by race or trauma. They married in 1949 with Albers's approval. (Both families initially objected to the interracial union, which was then illegal in all but two states, California and Washington.) In 1948, Asawa took classes at Black Mountain with the dancer Merce Cunningham and wrote to Albert that 'dance is joy, longing, crying, laughing, everything.' She translated this spirit into paintings and drawings of dancers — floating abstracted figure-eight forms, nipped at the center, with 'arms' and 'legs' arcing around spherical heads and bodies. In the retrospective, a selection of these works underscore how she extended this mode of thinking into her three-dimensional wire sculptures, which in 1952 she began calling 'continuous form within a form.' Cara Manes, MoMA's associate curator and a co-organizer, sees this concept as a 'manifesto' for her entire practice. 'She worked with this form for the rest of her life,' Manes said, 'exploring its iterative potential across a host of single- and multi-lobed sculptures, drawings and paintings.' Between 1950 and 1959, living in San Francisco, Asawa gave birth to six children and produced ambitious multi-lobed hanging sculptures for three solo exhibitions at Peridot. But she was frustrated by the gallery's refusal to show her drawings, which would have de-emphasized her image as a sculptor. After 1960, Asawa chose to retreat from the commercial market, creating a world of her own in their new home in Noe Valley. In 1968, the artist completed the 'Andrea' fountain for Ghirardelli Square, her first public commission. 'She wanted to make a statement about nursing mothers,' said Jepson, the model for its twin bronze mermaids, one holding a baby, the other a lily pad, like a palette, surrounded by turtles and spitting frogs. The sculpture was derided as a 'lawn ornament' and 'corny' by the landscape architect on the project, Lawrence Halprin, but quickly became beloved. In a public statement in 1969, Asawa wrote, 'I thought of all the children and maybe even some adults who would stand by the seashore waiting for a turtle or a mermaid to appear.' Asawa also recruited Jepson and scores of other creative parents to work in the Alvarado School Arts Workshop that she founded in 1968, outraged by the insipid art projects her children were bringing home. Jepson remembered seeing Buckminster Fuller one day working with 8-year-olds, building a dome from half pint milk cartons. By 1973, the workshop had spread to seven schools and received city funding. For her 'San Francisco Fountain,' Asawa had more than 250 schoolchildren and adults contribute little figures and city landmarks molded in her signature playdough on its 41 panels, then cast in bronze. When SFMOMA gave her a midcareer survey in 1973, 'it was her preference to have a dough-in where thousands of people could make baker's clay figurines in lieu of a snooty opening,' the museum's Bishop said. A member of the San Francisco Arts Commission, the artist was a driving force behind the establishment of the San Francisco School of the Arts, a public high school, in 1982. 'She wanted real artists in the classrooms,' said Susan Stauter, artistic director emeritus for the San Francisco Unified School District. 'She brought the Black Mountain College ethic with her. It was almost a religious commitment.' After Asawa developed lupus in 1985, she focused on drawings from her garden, which the retrospective also spotlights. Her hands became too unsteady after 2000 to continue drawing. She lived to see the school renamed the Ruth Asawa San Francisco School of the Arts in 2010. Asawa maintained that artists weren't special; they were just ordinary people who could 'take ordinary things and make them special,' she said. 'I always had my studio in my house because I wanted my children to understand what I do and I wanted to be there if they needed me — or a peanut butter sandwich.'
Forbes
24-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Forbes
5 Artists Creating Murals And Wall-Based Art Inspired By Nature
Sophie Mess, Journey of Progress 2025, Saatchi Gallery © Matt Chung Contemporary Artists Anne von Freyburg, Epoh Beech, Gary Myatt, Graphic Rewilding and Sophie Mess create murals and wall-based art that is inspired by nature or botany and demonstrates the uplifting power of art to improve urban environments and interiors. In an age of rapid urbanization and increasing dependence on screens and devices, a growing number of artists are reconnecting with the natural world through their work. Whether on the walls of galleries or in the public sphere through murals, these artists are harnessing the power of nature to uplift, inspire, and provoke thought. Many people living in cities have relentlessly busy lives with hectic work schedules which mean that taking time out for a walk in nature is impossible. There is increasing evidence that walking in nature–or even being exposed to images of nature–can improve mental health and reduce anxiety. A growing movement of contemporary artists are creating exterior or interior murals or wall-based art, often inspired by nature, which offers a visual boost to the senses and temporary respite from the pressure of contemporary life. By infusing public and private spaces with nature's beauty, Anne von Freyburg, Epoh Beech, Gary Myatt, Graphic Rewilding, and Sophie Mess are creating art that doesn't just hang on walls—it resonates with viewers, inviting them to pause, reflect, and remember the magnificence of the natural world. Two of the artists featured here–Sophie Mess and Anne Von Freyburg–are currently exhibiting in the Saatchi Gallery exhibition FLOWERS: Flora in Contemporary Art & Culture, and artist duo Graphic Rewilding have recently unveiled larger-than-life floral installations in Houston, Texas. Gary Myatt paints beautiful murals inspired by Old Master paintings and William Morris's Arts & Crafts movement, and his commissions have included Bacchanalia and Annabel's in London and murals in India and Sweden. Epoh Beech is preparing for a solo exhibition in London–The Pegasus Papers–which will feature a new series of hand-drawn wallpaper inspired by French narrative-style wallpapers, the Bayeux Tapestry and ancient Chinese handscrolls. Her wallpaper will be exhibited alongside pen and ink drawings and hand drawn animations featuring motifs drawn from nature and mythology, such as Hermes the seal and Pegasus the winged horse. Sophie Mess Sophie Mess at Saatchi Gallery © Matt Chung Sophie Mess is an artist whose work is a quiet meditation on the delicate beauty of nature. Her murals and wall-based pieces often focus on the subtle nuances of the natural world—leaves in the wind, a bird in flight, or a single flower in bloom. Her latest artwork is an eight-meter-high mural Journey of Progress, commissioned for the Saatchi Gallery exhibition Flowers: Flora in Contemporary Art and Culture. Based in the Devon countryside, Mess's bold botanical murals can be found in Europe from five-story buildings in France, hotel rooftops in Rome, city centre squares in Sweden, and throughout the UK. Her art blends elements of graffiti, pop art, and traditional muralism to create large-scale, immersive works. Her murals are known for their vivid use of color and abstract forms. Mess's murals are rooted in a belief that art has the power to create positive impact on the environment and elevate mental wellbeing. Sophie Mess at Saatchi Gallery © Lee Sharrock Her work seeks to break down the boundaries between urban environments and artistic expression, using walls as a canvas to tell stories. Mess fuses street art's rawness with the controlled techniques of fine art in her murals, and she demonstrates a deep understanding of traditional artistic principles, which she applies in her murals through a careful play of composition, perspective, and form. Yet, there is a freedom and boldness to her work that speaks to the rebellious nature of street art. I spoke to Sophie Mess at the Saatchi Gallery where her mural is a highlight of the Flowers exhibition, greeting visitors as they arrive. She told me what attracted her to street art and murals: 'What drew me to murals is that I just love painting big, and I love the energy of spray paint, it's a very fast, big medium. And painting in the public is really fun–I enjoy all the little interactions you get when people stop and chat to you–so It's a really engaging artform I've found.' She cites her inspirations as Dutch Master floral still life paintings and Georgia O'Keeffe's detailed flower paintings. Mess has also started growing flowers in her garden which she uses for her murals, and a tulip from her garden features in the Saatchi Gallery mural. She explains: 'I've only had a garden for the last three years and now that I've got a garden–it's only tiny–I absolutely love it. I'm growing lots of tulips, lilies, roses, irises and Clematises. I love Georgia O'Keeffe and her other-worldly spin on florals. I think mostly I'm just constantly being inspired by contemporary artists and my peers in the street art world.' Flowers – Flora in Contemporary Art & Culture is at Saatchi Gallery until 5th May, 2025. Anne von Freyburg Anne von Freyburg portrait. Anne von Freyburg is a Dutch artist based in London and is exhibiting in group exhibition Flowers at Saatchi Gallery, where she will also have her own solo exhibition titled Filthy Cute opening on 27th March. Anne von Freyburg embraces textiles and decorative art and is inspired by Rococo paintings 17th century Dutch Still Life artists such as Jan van Huysum. Her wall-based floral textiles are a unique way of bringing nature into interiors in a bold, sculptural way. I spoke to von Freyburg as she prepared for the solo show and asked what her inspirations are. She explains: 'Last year I started looking into the 17th century Dutch Still-Life and made three textile pieces after Jan van Huysum's flower still-life. As a Dutch artist I thought it was time to look into these fetishised, luxurious commodities and their dark colonial history. The flower-still life was one of the few subjects that women were allowed to paint. Men who painted flowers were then again a bit frowned upon. During the early preparations for my solo show the curator of Saatchi Gallery saw this work and immediately wanted it one for the 'Flowers' group show.' ANNE VON FREYBURG And what can people expect from her solo exhibition? 'Filthy Cute is an overview of my textile paintings spanning from 2022 to 2025. The show winks at western painting, beauty, fashion, pop and cute culture. The center-piece of the exhibition is a big wall-installation of irregular shape with dripping fringes in saturated colours. It reimagines one of the scenes from the Rococo paintings of Fragonard's Progress of Love series – known as one of the most powerful evocations of love in the history of art. My interpretation of the story is to not fall for the clichés and tropes of heterosexual romance but to be free and stay true to one self. No more fairy tales about men saving women, but women being the heroine in their own life story.' Graphic Rewilding Portrait of Graphic Rewilding Brighton-based artists Lee Baker and Catherine Borowski co-founded Graphic Rewilding on a mission to uplift people's lives with large-scale botanical and nature-inspired artworks created for urban environments. They connected by chance eleven years ago at Heathrow airport when they found themselves on the same flight to New York discussing their creative sensibilities. Borowski had a background in large scale events and curation and encouraged Baker to introduce his studio based nature art practice into the public arena, and so Graphic Rewilding was born. Baker & Borowski's creations inspire people to connect with the natural world and are aimed at providing some visual endorphins as an antidote to the lack of green spaces associated with urban living. Graphic Rewilding's uplifting murals and art installations have popped up around the UK and in China, Italy, Saudi Arabia and Texas. Baker explained to me how inspired he is by Japan and Japanese art: 'Through Murakami's lecture on the origin of the "Superflat" art concept Icame into contact with an Edo-era painter called Ito Jakuchu who had spent ten years painting a scroll series called 'The Colourful Realm of Living Beings'. The title alone had me captivated. I travelled to Japan for his retrospective exhibition and in front of his works I felt an indescribable power. I found his grave in Kyoto, gathered up leaves from the area and to this day I sprinkle a tiny amount of these leaves into my paint.' Artistic Statements, Westfield by Graphic Rewilding © Mark Cocksedge Baker & Borowski both grew up in urban environments–Borowski living in a London council flat with a tarmac car park view from her window, while Baker experienced what he describes as 'A total ambivalence to real nature'–so they both wanted to offer some uplifting urban art experiences to lift people out of their concrete reality. Baker explains how anecdotal evidence backs up research that art featuring nature can have positive effects on mental wellbeing: 'As an example, early on with Graphic Rewilding we created a project inspired by Victorian pleasure gardens on some ugly, unused asphalted land on a busy road in London. This was a blend of art and planting and as soon as we opened it to the public, people flooded in and used the space, to play, to eat their lunch, to relax. People said that there was hardly any public green space in the area and that even our theatrical garden was a hugely welcome addition to their community. But this isn't isolated, we see this reaction time and time again. Through Graphic Rewilding the city is our canvas and in London alone we have covered nearly 4.5 square km with our uplifting floral artworks. Our nature-inspired installations have given building facades floral makeovers, added meadows to billboards, and graphically rewilded entire streets, but has also reached into the digital realm with mobile animated AR experiences enhancing our work. We are certainly not proposing this as a replacement for nature, but I just want to illustrate that our brains can be hacked to suspend disbelief and accept that though we are not interacting with real trees, rocks, or animals, we are psychologically benefitting from a totally imagined nature scenario. Something the artist David Hockney likes to describe as, 'New Nature'.' Epoh Beech Epoh Beech in her studio © Justin Piperger. London-based artist Epoh Beech studied as a fine artist at Studio Simi in Florence, Cheltenham Art School and Chelsea College of Art, and has an MA in Art Therapy from the University of Hertfordshire. Her award winning hand-drawn animation The Masque of Blackness – Reimagined was projected onto The National Theatre Flytower on London's Southbank in September 2018 as part of The Thames Festival, and she is preparing for a solo exhibition in South Kensington. Titled The Pegasus Papers, the exhibition will feature hand-drawn wallpaper designs full of references to nature and mythological subjects. The Pegasus Papers comprise four digitally printed wallpaper designs and a collection of the pen and ink drawings combined to create them. Epoh Beech 'The Pegasus Papers' wallpaper ©"Justin Piperger. Beech told me about her influences, and what inspired her to create hand-drawn wallpaper: 'I have been interested in the relationship between still and moving images for a long time, this has been part of my practice for the last 15 years. I think it is interesting that, as with Chinese Scroll paintings and the Bayeaux Tapestry, we animate images over time as we look at them particularly when there is a narrative which we engage with. I have always loved narrative style wallpapers, so this was the inspiration to work with the images from my animations to make 4 narrative style wallpaper designs I call The Pegasus Papers. It kept sketch books for the designs and let the images evolve slowly over time, I was interested in continuing the narrative from my animations and using many of the same images from The Masque of Blackness Reimagined and The Marriage of The Thasmes and The Rhine for example Hermes, a time traveling grey seal and Pegasus the mythological flying appear. In The Pegasus Papers. To create the bespoke wallpaper designs, Beech draws the images in pen and ink on paper before translating them into a wallpaper repeat. The drawings are then scanned at a very high resolution, put into a printing file and sent to the wallpaper factory in Lancashire. She explains: 'The whole process for the wallpaper designs started in 2021, I have been working on The Pegasus Papers for 4 years, it has taken about 1 year for each design. But the ideas were formed over the last 15 years ago when I visited the Toile de Jouy Museum near Paris. Their designs all have such strong stories the images come alive and they move in the viewer's imagination.' Epoh Beech: The Pegasus Papers is at 11 Avenue Studios, Sydney Mews, London SW3 6HL from 31st March until 6th April, 2025. Gary Myatt Gary Myatt studio profile by Gary Morrisroe Mural artist and trompe l'oeil specialist Gary Myatt is a Central St. Martin's and Wimbledon School of Art alumni based in London. His many commissions during a 20-year career have included bespoke murals for iconic London club Annabel's and society restaurant Bacchanalia, while his talents have led to commission in Europe, India and the Middle East. He specializes in hand-painted murals and trompe l'oeil artwork inspired by Old Masters and is often inspired by nature. He told me where he draws inspiration from, and how incorporating natural imagery into his wall murals can create a distinct atmosphere: 'The murals I create, inspired by landscape, are not designed as trompe l'oeil illusions or picturesque windows looking out onto some kind of idyll. Instead, my focus is on evoking a distinct atmosphere or energy within the space that resonates with each interior's natural surroundings. I am fascinated by the infinite variety of nature's visual language: the subtle transitions of colour and texture; the interplay of light and shade; the contrast between hard and soft edges; the depth of aerial perspective, and the way elements subtly emerge and recede from view. In my landscape murals I aim to translate these nuances into paint, distilling the essence of the landscape into something that rings true.' Landscape Mural by Gary Myatt Myatt gives a bit of insight into the process: 'In terms of process, I paint my murals on canvas in my studio before installing them on site. This method not only ensures greater control over the final piece but also proves to be the most practical and cost-effective approach for all involved.'
Yahoo
11-03-2025
- Yahoo
Trans Alleghany Lunatic Asylum announces 2025 opening date
WESTON, (WBOY) — One of West Virginia's most popular historic landmarks is getting ready to open to the public for the 2025 season. The Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum, known for its dark and mysterious past during its operation between 1864 and 1994, has become a hot spot for history lovers and paranormal hunters alike, offering several different tours and hosting multiple events throughout the year. In 2025, the location will open for the season on March 29. The location has also been featured in several paranormal television shows, including both 'Ghost Hunters' and 'Ghost Adventures', as well as Discovery's 'Expedition X'. History Over Horror: What life was really like inside the Trans Allegheny Lunatic Asylum Tours offered at the asylum include: 1st Floor North Tour (45 min), which explores the maximum-security wing, Arts & Crafts, and auxiliary buildings and gives information on treatments, patient and staff life, and the architecture of the asylum. 1st Floor South Tour (45 min), the oldest section of the hospital built by Virginia and West Virginia. You can hear stories from the Civil War and learn about architecture details and patient experiences. Criminally Insane Tour (45 min) This tour takes place in the Forensics Building, where you'll hear escape stories and learn about the admissions process for the criminally insane. (Recommended as a supplemental tour) Daytime Paranormal Tour (90 min) This tour gives you a taste of the paranormal without the nighttime chills, taking you to four of the most active areas inside the 242,000-square-foot asylum. Guests must stay with their guide. Four Floor+ Tour (90 min) One of the most comprehensive history tours, you can explore the asylum's 130-year history, including treatments, construction, and life inside the wards. This tour involves multiple flights of stairs and covers nearly a mile of walking. No elevators are available. VIP Asylum Tour (90 min, Wednesdays & Saturdays Only) A one-of-a-kind guided tour through the Kirkbride Building, led by experienced guides with no fixed script. Dive into history, the paranormal, Civil War stories, and medical treatments—tailored to your group's interests. Tours begin at noon on Tuesday through Friday and Sundays, and 10 a.m. on Saturdays. The gates open an hour before the first tour, and registration begins a half an hour before. No reservations are required, but spots are secured on a first-come, first-served basis. Private tours are available by reservation, discounts are offered for groups with 15 or more guests, and buses and pets are welcome. You can learn more on the asylum's website. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
