Colorado 2012 Part 1

Laura and I took the last week in May to visit the great state of Colorado.  We flew in and out of Denver, spent some time in Denver visiting Laura's great aunt, and drove a rental car to Ouray to visit Brooke's family.

Our route.  Note that this is my idea of a non-roadtrip vacation.

The Denver Art Museum.  This turned out to be one of the highlights of our trip.  It was an excellent museum with a great collection.

Inside the Libeskind designed building.

Theodore Waddell’s "Abstract Angus"

Fox Games by Sandy Skoglund

We took a side trip to Boulder home of University of Colorado.

Some superheros walking around the pearl street mall in Boulder.

Driving through the mountains.

The road up to Mt. Evans (the thin white line is the road).

More driving up.

Some friendly mountain goats.

Mt. Evans

A Marmot (Whistle Pig) at the summit.

The rockies from the summit of Mt. Evans at 14265 feet.

Part 2 here.

Fort Worth

This last weekend we drove over to Fort Worth to show off the museums to a friend of ours from Korea.  It was a great weekend to go visit.  Some pics:

The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth designed by Tadao Ando

Book with Wings – Anselm Kiefer

Aschenblume – Anselm Kiefer

The Etruscan – Michelangelo Pistoletto

Ladder for Booker T. Washington – Martin Puryear

Vortex – Richard Serra

The Kimbell Art Museum designed by Louis Kahn

Sundance Square Downtown Fort Worth

Water Gardens designed by Phillip Johnson

Psalm 51

An illustration I did for my church in response to our ash wednesday psalm hymn (which you can listen to here).  Click on it for a larger view.

Darwinian Theory of Beauty

I really enjoyed this presentation by Mr. Dutton.  He is taking beauty seriously by recognizing the concept of beauty as being hardwired into the human heart (and dismissing the whole ‘eye of the beholder’ notion).  Of course, we disagree about how that hardwiring came about…  

‘Light in January’ by David Harman

David Harman is an up and coming Dallas painter whom Laura met at college and I met through my work (he wisely decided to go into painting instead of architecture).  His paintings so far explore themes of light’s interaction with the world around us.  He has an amazing studio over in Deep Ellum. 

You can see his work here: http://davidanthonyharman.com/

We recently bought a painting from him that seems made especially for our living room:

Tis the Season for Microbiology

So this year we really tried hard to geek out with the Christmas tree decorations (not that we haven’t done this before).  We went with a 'microscopic universe' theme complete with DNA garland (made from pipe cleaners), micro-organism ornaments (made with the laser cutter), and a lithium atom tree topper.  We also threw in some glass globe ornaments filled with the biodiversity of our backyard.  Some pics:

The tree in its full glory.

A neuron cell.

A plant stem section.

Some pampas grass.

Microscopic wood grain.

Amoeba!

Beware the bacteriophage!

A cross section of an animal cell.

Even the tree skirt resembled phyto plankton

The tree topper was a Lithium atom (because of its star like appearance and Trinitarian theme)

The micro-organisms ornaments

The first round of backyard terrariums.

The second round of backyard terrariums.

The first round of petri dish ornaments.

The second round of petri dish ornaments.