Chihuly Time!

Last weekend, Chris and Olivia were kind enough to bring us as their guests to the de Young museum to see the Chihuly exhibit. It was pretty awesome.  Here are some highlights of the exhibit. Here are some big circular things called Persians:

Next is me and a random little girl in front of some basket like things that are different colors inside than outside.  I think these were my favorite. 
Chihuly also made a series he calls "chandeliers".  Apparently the inspiration was his love of chandeliers.  huh. Here's one we decided looks like bug butts.
Next is this huge platform with hundreds of different pieces.  It was extremely impressive, although you get a bit of sensory overload. 
Here's a close up of one of the pieces.
At the end was a screening of "Chihuly in the hot shop", which was extremely interesting.  I think it has been broadcast on PBS if anyone caught it.  In it, Chihuly brings back many of the people he has worked with in order to recreate some of his most famous pieces.  It turns out that Chihuly has not actually blown any glass at all for over 20 years.  He is really just an ideas man, and spent most of the time standing around in his oversized hawaiian shirt and crocs (i don't actually know if he was wearing crocs, but he really looked like the kind of guy who would wear crocs). He also drew some circles with about 20 pencils at once while his "gaffers" were rushing around directing like 30 underlings and blowing tremendous glass structures. Occasionally they would let him help and he would kind of poke the glass with a stick.  He just looked really out of place in his own workshop, which led us to the conclusion that art of this scale probably runs a lot like a big lab. Chihuly probably never really even goes into the workshop much, but the sheer force of his name means that he gets the best glassblowers in the world.  He kind of gives them some guidance and money, they do a bunch of work, and he puts his name on it.

Another entertaining aspect of this movie was that the subtitles were on and were transcribing both the dialog and the lyrics of the background songs.  Reading the subtitles would go something like this:

"I met Dale back in 1974 while he was working on his basket series. Me and my boyfriend like to go to the park."

It was weird.  

After the museum we had an awesome dinner at B Star in the Richmond, which was awesome.  Thanks Chris and Olivia!