Beauty

This week, I went with Rene to Chicago, where he attended some meetings and a trade show. We stayed in a hotel right downtown, so it was handy for me to walk wherever I wanted to go. One morning, I walked the mile south to Millennium Park and just past it, the Art Institute of Chicago. I spent about four hours at the museum and enjoyed it. I saw some beautiful and famous paintings and some not so beautiful but still famous paintings. Since they say that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, I thought I'd post pictures of the two paintings that spoke most strongly to me. Why? I guess because I have some kind of emotional attachment to the subjects and found the paintings interesting.

Yep, one is a painting of two potatoes and the other is one of four in a series by Homer Winslow about croquet.

While I was in the Contemporary wing of the museum (think Picasso, Dali, and even more abstract and bizarre art), I overheard a little 3 or 4 year old girl say to her mom, "Mommy, when can we go back to where the grownups did the paintings?" Ha ha. It was hilarious and so true.

One of my favorite things at the museum was the "miniatures". I couldn't take my own pictures of them because the glass cases reflected badly, but here are some taken by others. These are rooms on a scale of one inch to one foot. One woman commissioned architects to make these for her. They are like dollhouse interiors, but on a very elegant and upscale dollhouse. There were kitchens from Virginia, parlors from New Hampshire, kitchens from Georgia, etc. There were also rooms from periods of European history. They were all simply awesome! It would be so fun to be able to indulge yourself in a hobby like that.