Balboa Park and Old Town-San Diego

I arrived in San Diego on July 4th to visit my daughter. It is one of the most picturesque places I have visited. This is my second visit and this time I came prepared with a mind to paint the beautiful scenery from my daughter's bed room.As luck would have it, the sun did not show up throughout my stay and the misty atmosphere due to a marine layer above the ocean transformed Lajolla into a hill station. I didn't miss sunny San Diego.It was a welcome change for me after Singapore, and I took this opportunity to spend my time at the Balboa Park and Old Town instead of the Lajolla cove.
At Balboa Park, the Spanish Village is a must see for an artist. Here thirty-seven working artist studios/galleries host over two hundred independently juried local painters. I thoroughly enjoyed a stroll through the galleries talking to artists.

Galleries at the Spanish Village------->

<----------- Artist at work

Artist's studio--------->

At the end of the day, it is the duty of the artists to clean the space around their galleries.

Some of the galleries belong to individual artists, while, some are shared by a group of artists taking turns to man it.









There are workshops for children conducted by the artists. This one was for making decorative items from coloured clay ----------->

The Spanish village is a great platform for the local artists of San Diego.




I spent the rest of the evening at the San Diego Museum of Art and was lucky to participate in an on-going art workshop conducted by Michele Guieu . Each participating visitor was given a A4 black and a A4 white sheet of paper, scissors and some glue and asked to produce a flat image of any permanent collection of art works from the museum. This video made by Michele gives an idea of how she wanted the art works to be transformed into black and white images.

It was fun to do some artwork just for the sake of spontaneous, unadulterated joy of creating

The Old Town-San Diego is yet another
interesting place.Here one is transported to a period from 1821 to 1872.It still retains the Mexican flavour. There is a week-end street market where local artisans sell hand-made items including pottery,jewelry,painting,hand-blown glass,and more..