Barrel Down DTLA – Modern Times Tap Takeover Coming

Posted on by Diversions LA

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All Photos by Jack Burke

Barrel Down Beer Hall
Barrel Down Beer Hall

Barrel Down is a hip industrial-chic beer hall in the heart of downtown Los Angeles. With forty taps – that’s right – forty, twenty of which are core brew offerings, twenty rotating – there are plenty of exciting craft beers to taste, and a sleek, minimalist environment to do it in. Adding even more to a beer-lover’s dream is the spot’s new monthly “tap takeover” series.  Coming right up September 2nd, Modern Times, the craft brew purveyor out of San Diego will be holding forth all night with six of their beers.

Apple Cider Sprouts
Apple Cider Sprouts

Along with the beer, there’s beer cocktails, and a wide range of dining options.  Barrel Down has a full Sunday brunch, entrees like fish and chips, and perfect beer drinking snacks like apple cider sprouts – Brussel sprouts with a tangy flavor twist. Our favorites were crisp and addictive cauliflower popcorn that comes with malt ale, ginger aioli  and chili lime vinaigrette, and a shrimp slider in a brioche bun, with the shrimp coated with a well-seasoned corn meal crust.

Cauliflower Popcorn
Cauliflower Popcorn
Shrimp slider
Shrimp slider

While a small patio also provides seating, the place to be is inside the long, narrow bar, with clean wooden lines, exposed brick, and high ceilings.

Outside Barrel Down - patio
Outside Barrel Down – patio
Inside Barrel Down
Inside Barrel Down

While the setting is modern and fun, and the bar snacks upscale and tasty, Barrel Down is, as is should be, really all about the beer. Bar manager and beer list cultivator Jason Hamilton is a certified Cicerone. Don’t know what that is? Well, we didn’t either. “There are three levels of certification,” Hamilton explains. “Currently I’m at certified beer server. It’s all about knowledge, from what one is serving and how to properly store beer, to in-depth sensory evaluation of beers. With forty taps,” Hamilton laughs, “being more tech savvy about draft lines and flavor testing is important.”

Modern Times Blazing World
Modern Times Blazing World

In anticipation of the Modern Times tap takeover, we tasted the microbrewery’s Blazing Worlds. This hoppy amber ale has an ABV of 6.8% , featuring Nelson, Mosaic, and Simcoe hops, which offer a rich fruity taste. The beer itself is dry, crisp, and has notes of both fruit and bread. Next came Grazias Vienna Cream Ale from Hess brewing, a creamy, smooth beer with strong notes of chocolate, vanilla, and toast, which offers a rich full taste and a dark malt profile. We also tasted two sours. The Holy Gose from Anderson Valley, which was deliciously light, served up a slight sour pucker along with clean, strong notes of salt water, coriander, and hops to go with its relatively mild 4.2% ABV.  It’s a beer that’s meant for summer afternoons and repeated tasting. Grand Teton’s Snarling Badger is a sour wheat with a stronger sour flavor and a 7.5% ABV. It’s as rich as the Holy Gose is light – an interesting contrast. Our last taste was of Alpine’s Hoppy Birthday Pale Ale, which is a light, refreshing ale that tastes a lot like an IPA.

The variety of tastes we tried mirrors the approach of Barrel Down overall. “We have the ability to support local craft breweries and expose people to the great flavors without being ostentatious,” Hamilton notes. “We make sure our bartenders know our products and can describe them, but we also recognize that some people just want to come in and have a drink without thinking too much about it. Others really want to know about their beer.”

Hamilton certainly knows plenty, including how to offer customers the best possible product. “We want to see lacing and head retention on the glass. We have double trunk lines with a glycol system to make sure that the beer is properly cooled at 34 degrees,” he explains. Barrel Down sources its beers from craft breweries around the U.S., and tries to learn as much about these sources as it can. “We believe there’s a story behind every beer and we like to tell that story to our customers,” Hamilton attests. And if customers are looking to craft their own brew, Barrel Down has that covered, too, with home brew classes offered on the mezzanine level above the bar every second Saturday.

Out of his forty taps, does Hamilton have a favorite? We got a smile and this dissemination “My favorite beer is the beer I’m tasting at the time you ask me.” Of course it would be hard to choose a favorite from among the wide variety of core and rotating brews, but we’re guessing Hamilton will choose a Modern Times draft as his favorite come September 2nd.

Are you “down” with that?

Barrel Down is located at 525 W. 7th St.

Downtown Core

  • Genie Davis; all photos by Jack Burke

The Art of Sedona

Posted on by Diversions LA

Sedona is an artful town. From sidewalk and parking lot statues, to galleries packed with local art, to the art that’s painted by nature in the sunset skies, the beautiful red rocks, and the cusp of a crescent moon.

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Tlaquepaque is a graceful, tree shaded Spanish-colonial shopping plaza.  Beneath shady trees on winding paths there are over forty shops and galleries. Also on site is the Oak Creek Brewery, which makes a relaxing spot to – pardon the phrase – enjoy the art of a micro-brew IPA.

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With summer’s heat intense by day, strolling these graceful paths at night can be just the thing. The Renee Taylor Gallery was open late, and featured a number of gorgeous, landscape-evocative pieces.

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Sculptures, particularly metal sculptures, are everywhere in Sedona: from bronze statues of skateboarders near a roadside to shimmering crystal laden wire trees in parking lots. Animal figures are especially prevalent.

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sedona scupltue

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And what about art painted by nature’s hand? At Airport Mesa, sunset viewing is a celebration that illuminates red rock monuments throughout the valley. At Crescent Moon Red Rock Crossing a view of the famous – and challenging to climb – Cathedral Rock is the lure; for an all encompassing view and the reflection of the sunset as it paints the sky, the Vista Point trail in Boynton Canyon is the perfect Western landscape. Architectural art? Try The Chapel of the Holy Cross, built into a red rock cliff as if it had sprung there.  It too is a work of art, inspired and commissioned by local sculptor Marguerite Brunswig Staude.

 

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Sedona sunset

sedona chapel

 

 

Watch for the Lights: Linda Sue Price – Glowing Neon Artist

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Neon artist Linda Sue Price creates compelling, vibrant images that, in her own words, “mix form, light, reflection and texture.” Communicating through the fluidity of her glowing shapes, Price expresses her idea that change is the ultimate form of communication.

Her mixed media neon sculptures use free-form bent, unique abstract shapes. Whether using backgrounds that are simple and reflective or complexly textured, Price creates a visual texture that reflects the neon itself. She layers elements that enhance the glow and playful aspects of the neon, such as acrylic rods and patterned backgrounds. Her pieces have a depth that cast the neon tubes as living elements.

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Such an approach may be natural to Price, who has been a neon-admirer since her childhood. She notes that “A visit to Las Vegas was always special because of the extensive use of neon all over the buildings. There was a palm tree in front of one of the casinos that I loved. Motel signs often had animation. I liked to look at them and try to figure out how the animation patterns.” Today, Price uses color as well as shape and background to make her pieces sing. While the initial color source is dependent on the gas itself, from neon’s red to argon’s purple, krypton’s white, and argon with mercury blue, colored glass tubing and fluorescent powders painted or baked inside the tubing create more color choices. She creates beading in the tube through the natural use of the gas itself, controlling it with small transformers that pulse the beading.

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In Price’s “Solo Works,” her “Dancing Girls” show five caught-in-motion female forms undulating against a multi-textured background whose peaked pattern evokes the shape of a house, with the girls perhaps dancing on a metallic lawn in front of it. Green and purple light images are the largest, with red, yellow, and spotted white figures significantly smaller, as if these were girls of all ages, shapes, and sizes, their spirits as bright as the light that represents them.

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Inspired by an article the artist read about the translation of Chinese poetry, Price’s “Words” series uses some of her own “favorite words such as Consider, Change and Pause.”  In “Change,” nearly entangled green and red coils serve as yin and yang like figures, partially framed by bent tubes of yellow, green, and red over a softly mottled background. “Reveal” is a complex yellow coil, bright as the sun, partially framed by green and blue tubing that remind the viewer of grass and sky.

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Price’s “The Garden” series stands as fresh and bright as the plant-like images she shapes. “Green Beans” contrasts stalk-straight blue and green tubes with curved blue and green shapes rising from a blue flower box. The images remind the viewer of a spring day, when all things are growing and possible. Price notes that the images in this series are crafted to “create a neon garden.”

Dedicated to the idea that it takes a great deal of discipline to stay focused in the moment, the artist’s “Stay in the Moment” series reflects her own necessary discipline in focusing on bending neon tubing. “The shape of the tubes express the joy of being in the moment,” Price says, and the viewer can see this beautifully illustrated in her rich orange, yellow, green, and blue “Wild Child,” for which she created a layout after bending the tubes. Her pink, red, and purple  

“Pacific Sunset” features a reflective blue background that warms the neon tubes into a riveting sunset image. Two of the tubes bead through a pulsing transformer.

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Evocative and ethereal in nature, the neon glow behind Price’s works stay in the viewer’s mind, their soft color and curved shapes imprinting like a new form of neon nature. Recently exhibiting Art + Science + Craft II at the Fine Arts Building in Los Angeles, Calif. , Price has upcoming shows in Long Beach at Arts Exchange, as part of an All Media Juried Exhibition at the Chico Arts Center in Chico, Calif., and also has two exhibitions planned at the TAG gallery in Santa Monica, Calif. before the end of the year.

  • Genie Davis

Lindsey Price

Posted on by Diversions LA

 

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Mixed media artist Lindsey Price is a photographer with a vision. Of doors to the imagination or perhaps another realm entirely in her “What’s on the Other Side” series, of the empty places where magic is just waiting to fill the gaps in her stunning black and white seascapes, “Empty,” and in “Desert Retreat” of pastel colored skies over rugged hills awash in late afternoon glow and soft sunset. Where her photography edges – into the magical and sublime – her collage’s fully land.

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Pink flamingos, wild flowers, and fields of Saguaro cacti meet ascending to a Middle Eastern palace with a minaret in one piece, evoking a fairy-tale landscape in a world where such juxtaposition may just lead to the excavation of ancient cities that stretch below the palace, or perhaps to a meeting of the minds and souls of the people crowded on rocks to the left of the collage.

As with all of Price’s collages, the field is packed with images, but never cluttered. The eye roves from one corner to the next, taking in the surreal and the real, the delicate colors, the kaleidoscopic technique. Speaking of a kaleidoscope, another Price collage uses the circular prismatic image pattern viewed through one as the frame work of a piece depicting four images of a woman’s strikingly made-up eyes, four of a flowering cactus, a spiny plant, a sea shell, each set of four meeting its twin on the other half of the collage. Between them, linking each set of four, is a set of two twinned women standing in profile against a single colored circle. The colors, with much green, blue, purple and iridescent shine add to the feeling of entering a mythical realm, a portal through space and time into the heart of a female-centric beauty.

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Similarly, three images of a dark haired woman, back turned to the viewer, stare toward three images of a planet, suspended in a glowing sky above dark mountains and swirling pink clouds below them. It’s a woman’s world, wherever we are. The woman’s body, the iconic shape of the mountains, and the beams of light all recall iconic anime images and Japanese wood block art.

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Inspired by the surrealist art movement, Price describes her continued amazement when she creates “a representation of my innermost desires, fantasies and dreams. I create my art with the home that others will travel through the images I’ve put together and be awakened to their own desire.”

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Price is a photographer, editor, designer, and artist, with her BFA in photograph and Media from the California Institute of the Arts. Residing in Los Angeles, she brings a SoCal feel to her work, from the California deserts depicted in her photography to the color palette in her collages.

  • Genie Davis