Going away party & Sidewalk art.

Hello everyone, the blog picks up again as I try to work through as much of the material as possible that I've captured since the last posting. Expect some updates over the next two weeks of older material to be followed by updates of our drive back. Enjoy!

The Party

The above doorway enters into the house of Tony Johansen and has been our  Sunday morning zendo since our mid-January arrival in Santa Barbara. It also served as the place of a going away party thrown for us by the Santa Barbara zen group.

Preparations in the kitchen.

Pre-feast chatter.

Looking good.

My plate - it was like thanksgiving without the turkey. 

Foods' eaten, what's next?

 

Ahh, entertainment! To our surprise Tony composed a western style ballad about two dharma bums (V & me) who came from the east to (all sing) Follow the Laid Back Way. It was very touching and great fun.

Tony's quite a musician who plays old time music at events around town with friends.

The audience.

Will certainly miss these folks and this place. Before moving on to the Sidewalk art, a few interesting notes about Tony. He has been hosting this zen group at his house for about 20 years now. He and his former wife, when they lived in San Francisco, used to drive Shunryu Suzuki (the founder of the San Francisco Zen Center) around to the series of talks that formed the basis for the book Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind. Tony is also an accredited teacher of T'ai Chi Chih. Unfortunately, we missed meeting his late wife Rachel who, sad to say, passed away just a couple of months before our arrival.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Sidewalk art

Over the three day Memorial Day weekend Santa Barbara hosted its 26th Italian Street Painting Festival on the plaza of the Old Santa Barbara Mission. The Madonnari, Italian for "street painters," used pastel chalks to create 150 large scale images as part of a benefit for the Children's Creative Project, a nonprofit arts education program of the Santa Barbara Education Office. Santa Barbara is the first to bring this type of festival to the western hemisphere from it's sister festival of Grazie di Curtatone, Italy. Most of the pictures presented here will be of the art after a few of the Mission and its grounds.

 Approaching the Mission with the Santa Ynez Mountains in the background.

 This way.

 We attended on two occasions, this, the first, being the more crowded.

The Mission pictures seemed self explanatory so now I'll just move on to the artwork for your pleasure.

The above was one of my favorites (Whatever floats your boat ((or dog))).

As can be seen one gets a bit of their work on them doing this stuff.

Some do come up with techniques for staying cleaner.

As can be seen in the above photo, some of these creations were quite large.

It really was amazing to see the amount of chalk used for these creations.

Ready for pickup the boxed supplies of just one of the 150 participants. 

The End