GAYE LEBARON
Sculptor Uribe, left out of ceremony, explains SR memorial
Mario Uribe, above, created the Santa Rosa Veterans Memorial Monument, left, shown at its July 2 dedication.
Published: Sunday, July 27, 2008 at 3:45 a.m.
Last Modified: Sunday, July 27, 2008 at 5:59 a.m.
Santa Rosa sculptor Mario Uribe is having a great summer. His colorful leaping trout sculpture in the fountain in Prince Greenway Park on Santa Rosa Avenue has motorists slowing down to take a good look.
And his design for the Veterans Memorial Monument at City Hall seems to have been exactly the right answer to the thorny problem of what form a war memorial takes.
It is too bad -- a crying shame, in fact -- that the committee that raised the funds for this tribute to Sonoma County war dead and staged such a fine dedication ceremony early this month neglected to introduce Uribe at the ceremony.
The several hundred people in attendance would have liked to hear from him just why the memorial sculpture looks like it does.
It's the circles, Uribe will tell you. The granite columns etched with the 448 names of those who died in 20th- and 21st-century wars embrace another column topped with a bronze, folded U.S. flag.
The folded flag, Uribe says, "is the ultimate symbol of the fallen soldier." But it's the circles that give the monument its overall theme.
Uribe: "I like to work in circles. I believe a circle has special meaning -- wholeness, completeness, healing, a very positive image.
"That's why I created a circular space and talked the committee off the idea of a pedestal with a human figure. I wanted this to be a place that was quiet and contemplative where people could come to be with the names on the columns.
"A circle is more in the realm of the spiritual than a statue is," he says.
The round granite columns are descending in size, which Uribe considers to be "a kind of prayer or hope for the future, for a lessening of war, for a need for less space for names. The smallest column has no names at all.
Uribe says he passes the sculpture every day on his way from his home to his studio and is pleased because "I have seen lots of people there, touching the names, which is exactly the response I was looking for."
He tells of a day in the first week it was in place, when he was at the site and two men drove up, saying they had come from Redding to see the monument. They were looking for a specific name, and Uribe, familiar with the placement, asked which war and pointed them to the right column space.
They found the name, he said. "They touched it, and they got down on their knees and they both cried." The dead soldier had been their high school buddy, they told him.
There will be much more of this kind of thing, Uribe knows. And this makes him both sad and proud. He's a talented artist and an articulate guy, and it's too bad he didn't have a chance to tell you all this himself.
LIKE OLD FRIENDS who go years between visits, paintings from the Sonoma County Museum's fine collection of early California art are renewing old acquaintances and making new ones in the current exhibit in the Old Post Office Museum's mezzanine gallery.
As it is with old friends, it's great to see them again.
In all our rush to what's new and unusual in art, we tend to forget how important Sonoma County has been to those early "masters" of the "California school."
Sonoma County was a frequent destination for the important emigres from the East, from the Hudson River School, who exploited the Sierra Nevada and the San Francisco Bay Area landscapes in the second half of the 19th century.
Just as they focused on the beauty of the Sierras, it took them no time at all to "discover" the redwood groves along the Russian River. It's safe to say that most of the artists who painted Yosemite also painted Sonoma County scenes.
Many of the early California works at the Santa Rosa museum come from the collection of an Oakland real estate broker named Ivan Hart. Hart grew up in Sonoma County on the Walker and Barnes hop ranches south of Healdsburg.
After graduating with distinction from Healdsburg High School in 1921, Hart went off to UC Berkeley, where he met a fraternity brother named Burl Howell, who would remain his friend for life.
Hart and his wife, Elvira, made their home in Piedmont, but, in the 1980s when it came time to find a home for their valuable early California paintings, they turned again to Sonoma County, where Hart's friend Howell was a patron of the new Sonoma County Museum.
The Hart gift became the centerpiece of the museum's art collection.
The names of the artists are well known to students of early California painting. The current show has several Thomas Hill works from the Hart collection as well as works by William Hahn, Frederick Schafer and Ransom Gillet Holdredge.
In addition to the Hart gifts, there are works on display by William Keith and the redwood scenes of Lorenzo Latimer, whose father, a famous jurist of the same name, owned land that is now Chalk Hill Winery. Latimer taught in both Santa Rosa and Healdsburg until 1910. The exhibit also contains four Sonoma landscapes by Sidney Tilden Dakin, who taught at Ursuline College, the forerunner of present-day Ursuline High School.
A painting by one of Latimer's students, Elizabeth Hoen, is on exhibit, Elizabeth being the daughter of Berthold (Barney) Hoen, who is considered one of the founders of the town of Santa Rosa.
There's the romantic view of White Sulphur (Kawana) Springs painted by Mary Ellen Carithers, whose son, William, founded several department stores in the North Bay, including the White House in Santa Rosa.
The museum's current "downstairs art" is the popular annual Artistry in Wood exhibit. It's always worth a trip.
But it would be a mistake to come and go without a visit to those old friends upstairs, who don't come out often enough.
Columnist Gaye LeBaron can be reached at 521-5294 and gaye.lebaron@pressdemocrat.com.
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