Many of the little towns along the Oregon coast have public and private galleries. On our recent visit to the coast, we took the time to visit quite a few of them. We noticed that many of them are now coops – meaning a group of artists who join or form an organization that rents a space and displays their art while the artists themselves staff the show rooms. We visited the Newport Visual Arts Center at Nye-Beach where right now a special exhibition by Jane Luana Stauffer is on display. She has quite a few landscapes on display but also a special series called “A lifetime of painting” where she represents personal elements of her life. The paintings on display are labeled with a price tag, and visitors can express their interest in a particular painting with the host of the gallery. While in private galleries the paintings are often literally taken off the wall when a buyer shows up, here the tags of paintings that have a buyer were marked with a little red dot, approximately a quarter inch in diameter. To the artists credit many paintings had these red-dot markers.
The next morning, I was doing my usual morning walk along the cliff where our hotel was nestled. A gravel path was lined with a fence consisting of solid round wooden posts perhaps eight inches in diameter and connected by heavy ropes. These posts proved to be very popular spots for the many seagulls that were circling around the property all the time and they could not be overlooked or rather overheard since they were making their typical loud sounds all the time – while flying or just sitting on these posts. You wonder if they were communicating among themselves or just complaining about something. So, as I was walking by, almost all these posts had a seagull sitting on them. They have so grown used to visitors that they also do not even fly up, when you walk by just separated by a few feet. Because of that I noticed that these seagulls all had little red dots – just about a quarter inch in diameter on what is called the mandible – or simply the lower part of their beak. Looking at on of those loud seagulls I could not help thinking – who decided to place a bid on you?
(Note: Apparently these red dots serve as a trigger for their chicks to beg for food!)