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A couple of photos of Couch Park in NW Portland. The park is basically the neighborhood playground and dog park, and as a non-dog-owner without kids normally I don't bother covering places like this here. But I dimly remembered that I'd taken some photos of the place several years ago, and it occurred to me that a post about the park would fill a moderately sized geotag-less hole in the humble blog's official map (which I sorely need to update again, btw), and if you think those sound like idiotic reasons to do a blog post you're probably correct. But as far as I know that's never stopped anyone from putting something on the interwebs, so here we are.
So I went back and looked through my old photo archives and realized I in fact had precisely two photos of the park. This probably seemed like a reasonable number to me at the time, given the limitations of circa-2006 memory cards and puny digicams that take AA batteries. I went ahead and uploaded those two, and figured I'd go back and take more and better photos before publishing this post. I made it there a couple of weeks ago, and walked around a bit, and I ended up not taking any photos at all. So I'm going to go with the two I have and call it good.
The pictures capture the two things I though had some degree of interest. A Lang Syne Society historical marker (I occasionally consider doing a project to track down more of those), and the abstract sculpture in the top photo. It's a 1976 piece simply called "Untitled", by David Cotter. And I admit even it isn't all that exciting from a photo standpoint. I tend to take lots of close up photos to show any interesting textures or details a piece has, and I didn't notice anything like that with this piece. The RACC page I linked to seems to indicate this is Cotter's only work in town, but the Smithsonian art inventory indicates he was also an assistant on Leland I, aka the infamous Rusting Chunks No. 5. The Smithsonian also refers to the Couch Park piece as "(Abstract Circle)", though I don't know whether that's an actual name or just a description. Cotter is also credited with a sculpture on the Catlin Gabel campus, and is listed as co-sculptor of something at Mount Hood Community College, and as an assistant on the Frank Beach fountain at the Rose Garden. So now you know.
1 comment :
The sculpture was kinetic moved and he intended children to use it as a playground. Once again our interests over lapped. I was writing about it for my blog. :)
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