Picture(s) a Day: Jan 6

I learned about the de Young Open 2023 right before its last weekend. Luckily there were tickets available for today, and they were free to boot, so I was excited to check it out. It’s an exhibit of submissions from SF Bay Area artists, over 800 entries, curated into a gallery space all together, from floor to ceiling, wall to wall. It’s quite an impressive showing. I’m glad I got to see it before it ended.

I didn’t actually want to take “proper” pictures of all the art, mainly took snapshots to note the ones I really liked seeing so I could look up information about them later (sadly there was no physical brochure for the exhibit, only a QR code you could scan to look up different works by their number). But I did end up with a few pictures of notable works that I figure would show off the variety of what was on display.

The event happens every 3 years, so I guess I’ll keep an eye out for it in 2026. Who knows, maybe I’ll try entering. 🤔

The other thing I was looking forward to today was receiving the Waterman Carène gunmetal fountain pen I ordered from someone on r/Pen_Swap (Reddit). It arrived while we were in SF, so it was a fun surprise to open after that event.

The pen is so lovely! It came with the original packaging, ink cartridges, and a converter. Of course I used the converter and filled the pen with Troublemaker Milky Ocean. I figured I would take it easy on the pen and not start with a shimmer ink. 😅 I did some initial testing of the medium nib and it seems to work quite well. Sadly, it isn’t a stub nib as I hoped (I thought perhaps the gunmetal version of the pen came standard with a stub nib, based on an assumption from a review video I watched), but that’ll be an upgrade I can pick up some time. I’m so excited to have a Waterman Carène in my collection now! I will definitely write more about this later.