The Galef Oceanside Asylum

2012

Welcome to our webspot. Our continuing mission is to explore our universe and even if we don't boldly end up where no one has gone before, we hope to make some new friends on the way. We are Janis and Frank Galef, and we live in Oceanside, California. Sharing our home now are Coco and Shiloh, a big striped Cichlid, and a pond full of goldfish and koi.Our son, Jeff, works for the Department of Water Resources in Sacramento, where he resides with his wife, Ivory, their two Chihuahuas and a cat.

Mister Cichlid

Coco and Shiloh

ABOUT US (not our day jobs)

Janis has a long-standing interest in vocal music.. She has been a fan of Connie Francis since childhood. If a friend hadn't shown Janis that there was a Connie Francis Webpage on the Internet it is unlikely that she would have permitted Frank to get a computer just to pursue paleontology and other alliterative activities. Janis has always enjoyed singing along with her favorite songs and has taken vocal performance classes at our local community colleges. While her interest in Pop led her into her studies, she is now interested in Blues, Jazz, and Opera as well. She has also been interested in art for a long time and we have seen a lot of fantastic art museums and installations in our travels. She is now taking classes in drawing and ceramics at MiraCosta College and doing some really nice work.

Frank has a longstanding interest in the past, the distant past. He has been fascinated by dinosaurs since he was a child and now enjoys learning and teaching about the ever-changing pageant of life on Earth. He has been collecting fossils and building models of dinosaurs for years. Some of his collection can be seen at his office and through our links. With the rest of his free time he enjoys discovering exotic cuisines, gardening and playing badminton (not for wimps). Plus, once a year, he carves a pumpkin for Halloween.

HALLOWEEN 2012

In some ways every day in Spain is Halloween. While the Spanish are currently a world power in soccer, basketball and tennis, their most famous sporting enterprise is torturing bulls in front of an admiring crowd. What better inspiration for a pumpkin than a ritual slice and dice of the sort that has inspired artists including Manet and Picasso on canvas, Bizet for an opera and Hemingway in the pages of The Sun Also Rises? I hereby add my work to that of these august artists. While I considered changing Hemingway's title to The Pumpkin Also Rises, I decided it would take up too much surface space. Instead I chose to spin off Blood and Sand, a 1941 movie starring Tyrone Power and Rita Hayworth, about a matador (and a girl). What, you never heard of it? Well, neither had I. Still, what a great title! Of course, pumpkins don't spill blood, so I did have to twist it a bit.

"SEEDS AND SAND"

HALLOWEEN 2011

Pablo Picasso is one of the most fascinating characters of the 20th century. I have seen a lot of his paintings, drawings and sculptures and one of his most impressive and famous masterpieces is Guernica. I haven't seen that one... I may have actually seen it when it was at the Metropolitan in New York, but I would have been pretty young and don't remember. I got close a couple of years ago when I was in Madrid, but ended up spending the day at the Prado and didn't get to the Reina Sofia where it now hangs. Well, I have seen plenty of his paintings with guitars, I'm just not that sure that I actually found the guitars. About Guernica... It is an image of utter horror and outrage at the bombing of a Basque village during the Spanish Civil War, an atrocity ordered by Franco against those opposing him, which incidentally gave the Kondor Legion of the German Luftwaffe a chance to practice aerial bombardment for an upcoming engagement. A bull and a horse are ensnared with the villagers in that reign of destruction and terror. While I didn't actually seen Guernica in its entirety, I did see a lot of preliminary sketches that Picasso made. When I began trying to think of a theme for my pumpkin this year, I didn't have to think too long. Consider how pumpkins must feel about Halloween; sort of the same sense that turkeys must get as Thanksgiving approaches. From there, the design practically drew and carved itself. Hence, this years magnum squashus, "Pumpkin with Guitarika." I had to get a guitar in there somewhere! By the way, the reason for the "k" in guitarika instead of a "c" is that the Basque spelling for the town is actually Gernika. While most of the faces were borrowed from Guernica, of course they had to turn into pumpkins, with supplicant hands replaced by foliage. I broke up the composition into a variety of cubist planes and added eyes, ears, facial parts and a leaf from other Picasso paintings throughout his career. And, of course, the guitar. I just referred to cubism, but lets be real, when working on a pumpkin, the proper term is roundism.

"PUMPKIN WITH GUITARIKA"

HALLOWEEN 2010

This has been a pretty frustrating year on a lot of levels and I was trying to think of a design that would reflect my feelings. Of course, from a standpoint of having it tough, consider how it must be for pumpkins this time of year. I'm going to guess it's pretty similar to how it is for eggs at Easter and turkeys around Thanksgiving. I think Edvard Munch, an expressionist, expressed it best in his famous painting DIE SKRIK, or as it is popularly known, The Scream. Of course, he expressed it from the point of view of a human. Naturally, I had to do it from the point of view of a pumpkin. One more thing; Munch showed the other people on the bridge headed the other way and ignoring the anguish. In my version, he is coming up from behind, and he has a knife.

"PUMPE SKRIK", OR "PUMPKIN GETS MUNCHED"

HALLOWEEN PUMPKIN 2009

In May we visited the Prado in Madrid. It is definitely one of the great art museums. There is room after room of incredible art and while I didn't go through it with carving a pumpkin in mind, as Halloween approached, I got to thinking about some of the images I had seen there. While the work of artists from all over Europe are on display, there is a definite emphasis on Spanish artists. I considered Zubaran's Lamb as a pumpkin, bound and calmly waiting to be carved. I thought of Las Meninas, by Velasquez, redone as a rather orange royal family being captured by one artist while being carved by another. I also considered some of the paintings of the Emperor, Carlos V, such as his mounted portrait at Muhlberg. With his Habsburg jaw, he's already almost a pumpkin. But then I realized that there was already someone whose art already reflected a far more twisted view of humanity than the darkest Halloween night. While Goya began his career painting fluffy "cartoons" for translation into tapestries and then switched to carefully veiled satires in his portraits of the royal court, his painful dealings with the dark side of the Spanish soul and the events of the Napoleonic invasion of Spain in the early 1800's resulted in what are called his "black paintings". Some say that a typical sight in a Spanish art museum is a white wall hung with dark squares, but Goya probably took this motif farther than anyone other than Rothko in his final days. While all of the paintings from this late period in his life are dark and despairing, probably none is darker and more despairing than Saturn Devouring His Children. Well, I had to go Goya one better. Not only do I depict the frustrated deity's infanticidal culinary choice, I show him after having first baked them in pies. Shades of Titus Andronicus! Goya worked in oils, and the palette he chose resulted in black pairings. Had Goya worked instead in squash, he would have been famed instead for his period of black and orange.

Here, then is my 2009 Pumpkin, PUMPKIN EATS HIS CHILDREN

HALLOWEEN PUMPKIN 2008

We spent a week in Bavaria last month, and along with the onion-domed churches that are so characteristic of German architecture, we were very impressed with Ludwig II's fantastic castle, Neuschwanstein. The walls inside are covered with murals inspired by scenes from Wagner's operas. I figured that if tales from Wagner were good enough for the King of Bavaria, they were good enough to appear on my pumpkin. Here, in a scene from Wagner's final opera, Parsifal, a naive and wild young man who is unaware of his noble birth and fantastic destiny, has stumbled into a magic realm. In a hunting mood, not unlike a certain vice-presidential candidate, he has shot the first thing he sees. Sadly, his victim is a gentle and peaceful symbol of this mystical kingdom and he is immediately taken to task by a noble knight whose job it is to ensure the safety of all creatures near the holy castle. While Parsifal gestures in protest that he is innocent, his action will have far reaching consequences... but that is another story. Well, in the original story, it was a swan that Parsifal shot, but this is Halloween!

Here then is my 2008 Pumpkin, "PARSIFAL UND DER RITTER VON DER HELLIG KURBIS"
(or PARSIFAL AND THE KNIGHT OF THE HOLY PUMPKIN)

HALLOWEEN PUMPKIN 2007

For those of you not up to date on your Cordon Bleu technique, the writing on the steps reads,

"La Méthode Française de tailler le citrouille".

Bon appetite!

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Here are some links to some of my other pumpkins from the past:

2006: Aztec Calabeza Carver. After spending several days in Mexico City where the Aztecs once spent a lot of time making ritual sacrifices, this depiction of the source of pepitas seemed to make a lot of sense. Chac mol is keeping the priest company and awaits his share of the filling.

2005: Samurai Pumpkin Carver. This is also called the Zen of Kabocha Seppuku.

2004: BAD Halloween. Birds Are Dinosaurs. This was my spin on the classic Knight rendering of dueling Laelaps, an early name for Allosaurs.

2003: Hellvis. Condemned to play the accordion for eternity.

2002: Death Takes a Holiday. Hey, this IS Oceanside, remember?

1992: Tilting at Windmills. Just because you are tilting at windmills doesn't mean there aren't any dragons!

1991: Rubbed the wrong way! Be careful how you wish for what you want.

1990: Dueling Dinosaurs. A somewhat modified version of a John Gurche painting. I substituted a Triceratops for the Styracasaurus.

Also, if you want to see another take on Pumpkin Carving, check out my brother Barry's website, Jack O'Lanterns by Barry Galef! Barry goes for a more high concept type of approach. He seems to be in the Opera Seria genre, while I tend more to stay in the Buffa style.

During the years that Jeff was at Humboldt State University, we made a lot of trips up and down this 750 mile long state. An important part of our history is the Mission system that was Spain's attempt to colonize California while stopping the Russians from encroaching from the north. There is a lot of controversy about the Missions and the people who were here first, but the old buildings and the museums associated with them are among the most fascinating places you can visit. Between the 1770's and 1820's, twenty one Missions were founded between San Diego in the south and Sonoma in the north. We were able to visit all of them, and some of our impressions are here, at Style Elements of the Missions.

The Galef Oceanside Asylum

LINKS