Visit to a Kayak Museum in Portland

June 4, 2017 / Matt Talley / Leave a comment

I read about a supposedly gem of a kayak museum in Portland maybe 18 months ago. Hmmm… Skin on frame kayaks… A museum… Huge collection… Quirky hours… Hmmm….

After a little inter-web research, I found that the Lincoln Street Kayak and Canoe Museum is the work of one man, Harvey Golden, and the collection is made up mostly of boats that he has hand built after surveying traditional native boats all over the world. I was in!

Mr. Golden uses the museum as a repository for his boat collection and as the home of his publishing house, White House Grocery Press. The museum is open to the public here and there as he is in the office and has set hours from 5-7 on Wednesdays. Knowing all that, I was almost vibrating to get a peek at his boats and paddles. I had stopped by the museum a couple of times when visiting Portland, but the timing was always off and I was never in town during the posted open time Wednesday afternoons. I was going going to be in The Rose City for a long holiday weekend and sent Mr. Golden an e-mail asking if he might, by chance, be around when I was in the city and to my great surprise, he got right back to me and agreed to let me stop by one Tuesday morning – I brought him a coffee when I showed up at the planned 10:00 on the dot.

His collection of boats, paddles, gear, accessories, and models is amazing – as are his books on the subject of kayaks. Here is the kicker though and why I am spending some time discussing a specific museum visit: he was amazingly generous with his time and spent over an hour and a half with me to explain the collection, bits & bobs, details, accessories, etc… I really, really appreciated it. His generosity of time is not something I see a lot of these days.

If you are into kayaks or boats in general, stop by the free museum and take a look at his books as well. I am about 70 pages into the super-detailed and annotated Kayaks of Alaska and want to build them ALL…

Musée du bois et de la Marqueterie in Revel, France

June 9, 2015 / Matt Talley / Leave a comment

Last summer My Father-in-law, my son, and I made a road trip to the Musée du bois et de la Marqueterie (Museum of Wood and Marquetry) in Revel, France (about an hour from our house if you don’t get lost or almost run out of gas…). The town is one of the noted centers of high quality furniture production and has historically specialized in wood marquetry. It goes back to 1888, when Alexandre Monoury – a master cabinetmaker – left the workshops of Versailles and settled in Revel. Under his influence, several workshops were set up there and many of those origional shops are still going strong today.

The museum highlights the work of the area, new and old, and we spent a couple of hours marveling at the tools, example pieces and shear artistry of furniture, sculptures and marquetry examples on the second floor of the facility.

As a note – this part of France is stunning with sunflower and wheat fields(the Tour du France rides through or by every year) and the town has an stunning 13th century market square and a beautiful central market hall with a quadrangle of historic buildings around it that are home to restaurants, a fabulous bakery/pastry shop and antique shops.

Historic Furnishings from the Bavarian National Museum in Munich

May 25, 2015 / Matt Talley / Leave a comment

Stamps-With-Foot and I had a long weekend in Munich last month and we spent the better part of a day in the Bavarian National Museum (Bayerisches Nationalmuseum) looking at cool old stuff. Their furnishings collection is impressive, with rebuilds of entire rooms from castles, hunting lodges and ale houses from 1400-1800. My wife gave me free reign to snap pictures to my little heart’s content so what follows is a collection of chests, cabinets, beds, and other furniture from their collection. I also love wood carvings and bronze, so expect a sampling of those as well. There were a lot of images to load and I put up smallish images for the sake of speed, so if you see one that you REALLY like and want more detail, let me know and I will send you a full sized image and all of the notes that were attached to the piece.

A visit to the Museum du Augustine’s in Toulouse

May 23, 2015 / Matt Talley / Leave a comment

La Museum du Augustine’s in Toulouse, France is a former convent that is France’s second oldest museum and full of art and sculpture. The cloister garden in both beautiful and peaceful in the spring and summer. Below are a few pictures taken from a recent visit.

Museum of the History of Paris – a MUST see

March 25, 2015 / Matt Talley / Leave a comment

The Musee Carnavalet (The History of Paris Museum) is a hidden gem! It is off the normal well-beaten tourist path and within walking distance from St. Eustace Church and the Picasso Museam. It is full of treasures including an entire Alfonse Mucha designed jewelry store – see pictures below. It made me feel all funny inside when my wife drug me there. She tried to get me to go with her this summer , but I wanted to do something else that now escaes me. I should have listened to her. There are 100+ rooms of paintings and sculpture, models, furniture, and good stuff to gawk at.

Set in a series of old Parisian town homes and Orangeries that are all put together with walkways and joined gardens. One of the cooler aspects is that you wander through re-creations of rooms from the French Revolution to the Paris Commune, and enter into the private spaces of famous Parisians like Marcel Proust’s bedroom with his brass bed and his little table covered in pens, ink, and notebooks. As I said, I was drug here the first time, but it is on my list to visit now even if I am in the city alone for a few hours. It was not too crowded at all and the gardens are a really nice place to sit in and catch up on your travel journal entries. Did I mention that the admission is free?!

A visit to the Musee Picasso and a little advice

March 18, 2015 / Matt Talley / Leave a comment

I was never a huge Picasso fan. I love a couple of his pieces – mostly his stuff from Paris in the 1904 era and some additional pieces from the Early 1920’s. We have a print of Blue Nude hanging over our bed and I have a small print of El hombre da la Mancha in the upstairs bathroom, but I don’t really enjoy his sculpture of cubist paintings. Who am I though? My opinion about Picasso’s work matters very little to anyone but me.

All that said, the Picasso Museum in Paris is a must see for modern art fans. It is a couple of hours well spent with a few nice sidewalk cafes nearby. It has just reopened after a multi-year re-build (millions over budget) and it was on our planned tour of Paris this time around. After standing a a very long line, Stamps-With-Foot and I walked the galleries and I saw a couple of pieces that I had never seen before that I really enjoyed and I liked the new building itself almost as much as the art. Take a lesson from us: buy your tickets in advance though and the best way to do this is on the museum website. I will say this again: buy.your.tickets.in.advance. If you fail to heed my advice you will stand in line for 1.5-3 hours.

Desk Fetish – Revel, France

September 13, 2014 / Matt Talley / Leave a comment

I may have mentioned before that I have a certain unnatural attraction to desks – a lust if you will. We have five desks in our house in France home, three in our Seattle house, and I still NEED more. I love me a Victorian Wooten, a Danish cabinet-desk will cause me to pant, fire screen panel desks start me to sweat, roll-tops make me smile, and the smooth curves of an Art Nouveau model will make me twitch.

Whenever I travel or go to a museum or furniture shop, I have a wandering eye for desk-like furniture – I almost feel like I am cheating on my desks at home. It happened again recently, when I went to Revel, France on a road trip with my son and Father-in-law. When we got home and started looking at the pictures, I realized that more then half were of desks, desk drawers, the corner joint of a desk, image after image of drop leafs… I with we had more rooms…

Here are a few pictures from that trip:

Elementary…

March 6, 2012 / Matt Talley / Leave a comment

Sherlock Holmes has become an everyday occurrence in my life. Last year my wife and I read a few of the Laurie King/Mary Russell books. She got The House of Silk and The Sherlockian for Christmas. I have started re-reading all the original Doyle stories and last, but not least… Sherlock Holmes is now a draftsman at my J-O-B. No really, I work with a man who’s actual real legal name, given at birth, is Sherlock Holmes. I wanted to hire the guy from the milli-second that I saw the heading of his resume, but he is actually a fantastic draftsman and a great asset.

Anyway, I have been and will be spending more than a little time in London and England in general this year and on my most recent trip I happened to find myself on Baker Street in London. Well, far be it from me to miss a weird travel opportunity. The wife and I walked down to the Sherlock Holmes “Museum” near the Baker Street tube stop and took the tour. We enjoyed the aside in our busy day and hammed it a photo-op. Stamps-With-Foot makes a pretty little Watson…