March 22, 2021
San Angelo turned out to be a pretty big surprise--in a good way. It turned out to be a place I think we just touched the surface of, a place it would be fun to return to. There were many things that were closed because of Covid that I would like to see, and there were some great places we didn't know about before we just stumbled on them. One of those amazing, unanticipated finds was Paintbrush Alleyway.
This second sign has a hilarious nod to Bob Ross (star of the TV show The Art of Painting) in the middle section.
The alley is part of San Angelo's "Art in Uncommon Places" initiative that we had seen the fruits of in other places. The sign says it is themed after the 1956 movie Giant, but there were a lot of other "themed" murals before we got to Giant.
So here are some of the other murals. One of my favorites is this peacock that welcomes visitors.
There was one piece of sculpture in the alley--two kids on what look like unicycles--made from scraps of metal.
This horse cut out of a sheet of metal is half way between sculpture and a mural.
The rest of the art pieces are murals, but what a variety of styles and subject matter!
Some walls had multiple, seemingly unrelated paintings on them.
It wasn't hard to see where the Giant movie references began. Giant, a 1956 movie starring James Dean, Rock Hudson, and Elizabeth Taylor, was nominated for ten Academy Awards and was Dean's last leading role. Texas is obsessed with it, in spite of the fact that it was filmed 65 years ago.
The Hotel Paisano was the place all the stars stayed and hung out together when they weren't filming. This mock version has scenes from the movie in each of the windows.
A super close-up of Elizabeth Taylor's eye?
The movie was based on this book by Edna Ferber:
We especially got a kick out of this mural because a few years previous . . .
Back to some other topics:
The painting of the man in prison has a mirror for a face, and his hands wrapped around the bars are especially creative.
Can you see the Texas windmill?
ALL of this (mostly kitschy) street art is in a few alleys in San Angelo. What's not to love about this place?
But wait! There is more! Remember the
jackrabbits in Odessa? San Angelo has sheep. According to
this website, there are 104 ewe-nique sheep scattered throughout town. I only got photos of FOUR of them. Bob, if we ever go back, I have to find 100 more.
Of the four we saw, I especially loved the one on the bottom left in front of the Lion's Club, a group known for collecting and redistributing used eyeglasses.
We had one more place to go see--a waterlily park. At first we thought we would walk there, and we started by going under this freeway offramp, a stunning piece of architecture in its own right.
We ended up going back to the car and driving to what is known as the International Waterlily Collection, a terraced park with a series of rectangular pools where different varieties of waterlilies are cultivated.
This is one of the places we will have to come back in September when the lilies are at their peak.
Imagine these lily pads sporting large pink, purple, red, yellow, blue, or white flowers. Each group of pads is identified by a marker that tells what kind of lily grows there.
We did see a couple of lonely holdouts.
The terraces surrounding the pools, on the other hand, were covered in blooms, including California poppies, daffodils, Texas bluebonnets, and roses.
Hey Bob, San Angelo is a must-return-to place! (But maybe we should visit Giverny, France, to see Claude Monet's waterlilies first. It would give us some perspective.)
I, too, loved San Angelo and would love to go back on a day when everything is open. Very, very artsy.
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