The Colors, Reflections and Refractions of Autumn at Philbrook Gardens

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Last week I posted about an special art exhibition at Philbrook Museum of Art here in Tulsa. My last line was that I was going to the gardens. The gardens at Philbrook are every bit as special as the art inside the building.

The signature feature of the gardens is the tempietto overlooking the reflecting pond. Philbrook started out life as a mansion for a rich oilman back in the day. The reflecting pool was the swimming pool and the change rooms were underneath the tempietto.

I love all the views and reflections that are possible in the pond.

_DSC0537_DAP_Aquarelle_Noveau Philbrook Gardens

This is a highly edited (can you tell?) photo of the main building at Philbrook (Villa Philbrook) from the steps of the tempietto. Sorry I couldn’t resist.

There is always something blooming in the gardens.

I revived my glass sphere and brought along a point and shoot camera that has a macro setting. I got this thing years ago and used it a lot and it ended up in the back end of my Subaru. I saved it. I still love the photos that one can get out of it. It took me a while to figure out how to do that. I also learned how to hold it. If you hold it in your hand in bright sunlight it’ll burn a hole in your hand. It acts like a magnifying glass. So I hold it off to the side or from the top. Technically I think this is refraction and not reflection.

This is a shot of some of the pumpkins on display. The sphere gives you an upside down view of the scene so I feel free to cheat and turn the whole photo upside down if I have to.

Blooms in the water.

I always feel chill after just a little time in the gardens.

I am linking with My Corner of the World.

Shadow Shot Sunday – Analemmatic Sundials

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The other day I was poking around the parking lot of the Tulsa Air and Space Museum on a special type geocache called an Adventure Lab. As part of completing the Adventure Lab I came up on this thing.

What? A Human Analemmatic Sundial. Analemmatic sounds like some sort of embarrassing medical condition.

My best bud Mr. Google tells me that an analemmatic sundial is special sundial where the hours are arranged in an ellipse and hour pointer is vertical. A human analemmatic sundial is where you are the pointer. Also you have to stand on a different spot every month for it to work.

Rest assured I was not up and out of the house by 8:30. The other part of this special sundial is that you have to correct for daylight savings time yourself. I thought it was pretty cool.

It was not the first time I have ever seen a sundial like this. Tulsa’s Turkey Mountain Urban Wilderness Area has one but it is labeled as a Human Sundial. Human is a lot easier for me to spell than Analemmatic.

It has been there eight years, just off the lower parking lot and still works.

It was an Eagle Scout project. God bless Eagle Scouts I say. They keep the world going around.

Anyway, I learned something. You probably knew all about it.

I’m linking with Shadow Shot Sunday

Weekend Critters – Waterfowl

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Earlier this week I went on a hike at Oxley Nature Center. I heard all sorts of birds and got brief views of some of them. The only photo I got is of these waterfowl on one of the ponds on a long shot. I think they are mainly ducks and maybe a couple of geese.

I am still not much of a birder. I am hiking along and I can tell that I am really close and yet I hardly ever see the smaller birds and the cardinals are very skittish and stay in the brush so it is hard to get a photo of them. It is fun that with the Merlin App I can at least identify them. Still I only have about five birds on my life list. Oh well.

Back home here is Kodi the Pomeranian resting.

And Lizzy the cat resting trying to escape from the house cleaners.

On the human little critters. Halloween is just too stressful for Kodi so we go dark. Turn out the porch and driveway lights and the lights in the rooms at the front of the house. So something funny happened. This group of kids showed up and rang the doorbell anyway and misread out “No Soliciting” sign.

That’s a wrap, linking with Saturday’s Critters this week.

Family Fun at the Tulsa Botanic Garden

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A couple weeks ago or so we loaded up the family and headed up to the Tulsa Botanic Garden. They always have good stuff to see in the Fall.

We checked out the scarecrows and decided it was a down year for them. These were my favorites.

A stiff breeze was flying and our flag was flying proudly. It reminds me for my fellow US Citizens. Vote on November 5th, unless you have already done so.

The garden had opened up something new. An arboretum with a pergola at the top. The pergola had rocking chairs so the other two appropriated those.

The cover of the pergola was cool! All these leaves in it. Made a great pattern on the ground.

And the beams on the side, reflections, projections and shadows. I love little details like this. Costs a lot of money but hey that is what rich donors are for, right?

When the water is running I always take a short video of the water running down the terraces.

We went for hike on their trail. It is a cool trail than meanders through the woods and prairie sections.

One immediately sees that they have had a controlled burn fairly recently. I love good controlled burns. It clears out the undergrowth, kills invasive species and opens up the forests for a more natural and healthy effect.

I was sure glad to see it.

And then we went to the Childrens Garden section. I guess I am wondering if the parents threaten to feed their kids to the monster there if they don’t behave?

We had a great time!!

I am linking with Skywatch Friday

Philbrook Museum’s “American Artists, American Stories” from the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts

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Tulsa’s Philbrook Museum of Art has this exhibit going on currently of American paintings from the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. We are members of the museum so I went and took a look at it. They had tons and tons of art. The following were my favorite works.

This work by Charles Willson Peale “The Artist in His Museum” is a perfect opener for an exhibit.

I loved the exuberance of Maxfield Parrish’s “Princess Parizade Bringing Home the Singing Tree”

I loved Young Woman by Isabel Bishop. It was painted in 1937 but it looks very contemporary to me.

Ariadne Asleep on the Island of Naxos by John Vanderlyn. Such a dreamy scene.

Some still life’s bore me, others like this Still Life with Fruit by Severin Roesen I find very exciting.

And this by Philip Leslie Hale, “The Crimson Rambler” is very beautiful. I also find it intriguing because according to the accompanying card, Hale made a protest against woman’s suffrage.

The scene looks like right out of a film noir movie. “The Soda Fountain” by William J. Glackens.

So we are hearing about how humanity is threatened by AI and that we are going to be inundated by images and videos generated by AI that have no base in reality. You know that has happened before. This is “Penn’s Treaty with the Indians” by Benjamin West showing William Penn and a Native American Chief, Tamanend in a peaceful transaction where the Indians get goods and the white people get land. Cool! right? Wrong! The land was taken from the Native Americans and this painting of an event that never happened was commissioned by Penn’s son to bolster his family’s image. This led to people thinking it is historically accurate. I find it fascinating how art is harnessed to propaganda.

And I loved this, “De Soto Raising the Cross on the Banks of the Mississippi” by Peter Frederick Rothermel. The European explorers were a brave lot I think. Not just in exploring the North American continent but in things like planting a cross and declaring some sovereign in Europe now owns a couple gazillion acres just because.

And how about this hidden Thomas Moran work, “Two Women in the Woods” If you are like me, it was like, what two women? Oh there, and such a beautiful scene, with the two women hidden in the shadows. Not quite as dramatic as some of Moran’s other works but still a great painting.

As part of the exhibition, many of the works were displayed on a “gallery wall” similar to exhibits in the 19th century. It was interesting. To help study it they had a couple of couches and some binoculars available to patrons to inspect the works. They also invited patrons to try and find insights or ideas on why the works were arranged the way they were. It was kind of fun to sit there and just think about the works on the wall and how adjacent works were alike or different.

So after this exhibit I checked out the gardens but that is a subject for another post.

I am linking with My Corner of the World.

Shadow Shot Sunday – Last Sunday in October Edition

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In my previous post I wrote about my new action camera and tested it on our pets. A day or two later I put it on my bike and went for a ride. I set it to take a photo every ten seconds so I end up deleting almost all of the images. Here I am at a stop, off my bike. You can see the action camera mounted on the bike and me. If the weather is good I carry along my superzoom camera.

Here is another rest stop with a shadow and my fingers.

This is a phone shot at a local park. I love all the various shadow patterns.

One day I loaded up my drone and took it the Thomas Gilcrease House here in Tulsa. A one time oil baron who bequeathed the Gilcrease Museum to the City of Tulsa. His house has formal garden with a fountain so you can see the shadow of the fountain.

Here is what the fountain looks like.

I am linking with Shadow Shot Sunday

Saturday’s Critters – Squadron, Scoop, or Brief, your Choice

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I have a new toy. An action camera. Not a GoPro but a knockoff that costs literally one tenth of what a GoPro does but is only 60% as good. It’s my second of this type and it is really good. I experimented on Kodi with it. He couldn’t figure out if it was a toy to play with or food to eat. It is pretty tiny.

So I also experimented on Lizzy the Cat with it. I think that people who experiment on pets are terrible, don’t you.

I went on a bike ride the other day. I stopped for a rest break at the Turkey Mountain lower parking lot. I saw this dinosaur skeleton off in the woods on a trail meant for children.

Later in my bike ride I happened on this “pouch” of American White Pelicans on a sandbar in the Arkansas River. I love all the various collective nouns for birds. My favorite is a murder of crows. Other terms for a group of pelicans are “squadron”, “pod”, “pouch” or “scoop”. You can always call them a flock, other terms are “brief”, “raft” or “rookery.” I love it.

I’m linking with Saturday’s Critters

Skywatch Friday – New Perspectives!

I went out to the Tulsa History Center to check on the revamped installation of the Oklahoma’s Five Moons. The installation had been damaged by some dummy who stole one of the metal sculptures and then tried to sell it at a metal recycling place. To their credit the recyclers called the police and the guy was apprehended. The sculpture took some time to be repaired and the History redesigned the installation.

Left to Right: Maria Tallchief, Marjorie Tallchief, Yvonne Chouteau (in front), Moscelyne Larkin, Rosella Hightower.

The Five Moons are five Native American ballerinas from Oklahoma who achieved worldwide fame in the late 1940’s and 1950’s. After their performing days were over they became instructors and promoters of their art. Here is a good summary of their careers.

I brought along my drone this day. I have many photos of the ballerinas but they are all on stands and up in the air so I thought that with the drone would provide a new perspective. And I think it worked pretty well.

It was a windy day and my little featherweight drone was struggling to stay in one place but I made it happen.

The lady in the background in the photo above showed up in the middle of my flight and asked what I was doing in a friendly manner. We got to talking and turns out that she is an Urban Sketcher. Which I have come to find out means to sketch on location. So kind of like being an instagrammer except on paper. I thought it was very interesting. You can find out more about Urban Sketching here. She is on instagram as well so we followed each other. We also talked about the Five Moons. We both agreed that not five Oklahoman’s out of hundred know who the Five Moons are. Which is a shame.

So buoyed by my experience with the Five Moons I headed over to nearby Woodward Park and launched the drone on the “Appeals to the Great Spirit” Sculpture. It is really tall.

I think the overhead shot adds to the effect of the sculpture here as well.

It just goes to show that you don’t have to fly way high to use a drone effectively.

I am linking with Skywatch Friday and My Corner of the World.

Here is a previous post on the Five Moons

Botanic Garden Shadow

We went on a family outing to the Tulsa Botanic Garden. Lots of cool things to look at including this shadow featuring a handrail and other elements of steps in the garden.

I am linking with Shadow Shot Sunday

Saturday’s Critters – In and Out Edition

Here’s a sculptural critter, some sort of heron I think at the Linnaeus Demonstration Gardens.

And another artistic critter. This little girl on the back of a turtle at the Tulsa Botanic Garden.

I hardly ever use my drone for critter photography and this is “Appeal to the Great Spirit” at Woodward Park. I used my drone to get a different perspective on this sculpture.