History

I was looking at photo archives on my daddy’s blog. I found some pictures of bridge jumping. I really can not believe I used to do things like that! I don’t know if I would have the guts to do it now. Actually I would. I miss Idaho for crazy things like bridge jumping.

AWKWARD!!!

This picture makes me kind of happy. I can imagone my residents doing this. It makes me laugh!

day 5- a picture of somewhere you’ve been

Since it is 12:30am I can talk as if Saturday was yesterday… since TECHNICALLY it was. Yesterday was a pretty good day. Woke up and helped clean the church building, took residents to the Christmas Creche Exhibit in Maple Valley, and then went to Ashlee’s birthday party at the jumpy place. It was a lot of fun!

Anyways… a picture of somewhere I have been…Is it any suprise I would pick a place in Chicago?

I choose the Art Institute of Chicago.

It is an absolutely amazing place. There is a different type of reverence inside. I am just completley overwhelmed and mostly speechless when I am there. It really is my favorite place on earth (not that I have really ever traveled!) My favorite place in the Art Institute is the painting called: A Sunday on La Grande Jatte by Seurat.

Here is some history for you courtesy of Wikipedia.Seurat spent over two years painting A Sunday Afternoon, focusing meticulously on the landscape of the park. He reworked the original as well as completed numerous preliminary drawings and oil sketches. He would go and sit in the park and make numerous sketches of the various figures in order to perfect their form. He concentrated on the issues of colour, light, and form. The painting is approximately 2 by 3 meters (6 ft 10 in x 10 ft 1 in) in size.

Motivated by study in optical and colour theory, Seurat contrasted miniature dots of colors that, through optical unification, form a single hue in the viewer’s eye. He believed that this form of painting, now known as pointillism, would make the colors more brilliant and powerful than standard brush strokes. To make the experience of the painting even more vivid, he surrounded it with a frame of painted dots, which in turn he enclosed with a pure white, wooden frame, which is how the painting is exhibited today at the Art Institute of Chicago.

In creating the picture, Seurat employed the then-new pigment zinc yellow (zinc chromate), most visibly for yellow highlights on the lawn in the painting, but also in mixtures with orange and blue pigments. In the century and more since the painting’s completion, the zinc yellow has darkened to brown—a colour degeneration that was already showing in the painting in Seurat’s lifetime.[2]

The island of la Grande Jatte is in the Seine in Paris between La Defense and the suburb of Neuilly, bisected by the Pont-de-Levallois. Although for many years it was an industrial site, it is today the site of a public garden and a housing development. In 1884, the island was a bucolic retreat far from the urban center.

I really wish every person could have a chance to stand next to this amazing and beautiful painting. It is HUMONGOUS! It is so huge is it overwhelming.

That is the second time I have used that word: overwhelming. It is really the only way to describe the Art Institute of Chicago.