Autumn in the Smokies

I began the journey home over the past two days, but dallied for hours in the Blue Ridge and the Smokies, which are in full glorious fall color.  The weather was definitely autumnal...a strong cold front dropped temperatures into the 30s and 40s, along with a brisk wind.  Quite a change from Charleston and Miami!  But the colors are spectacular.  This pic and most of the others were taken in Great Smoky Mountains NP, or close to it along the Blue Ridge Parkway.

The hillsides blaze in a palette of color.  The photographer is always searching for the perfect combination of color and light, and occasionally you can come close.  It was a brisk 31 degrees when I took this shot.

The woods, when backlit by the sun, are magical.  One might even call the scene heavenly.

A typical hillside in the Smokies.

Up close, the sunlit leaves resemble an impressionist painting.  Closest thing a photographer can get to the genre!  Blow this pic up for full effect.

Sun, colors, and shadow create endless mosaic forms.

Light, leaves, and tree trunks.

The forest undergrowth can also be spectacular.

A stream courses through the autumnal Appalachians.

The forest floor presents a scene out of a Jackson Pollock painting.

A trail in the Smokies.

Around many corners of the Blue Ridge Parkway and highway 441 through the park, a vast array of colors await.  

The first time I was here was in mid November 2006...a little late.  The leaves were almost all gone.  This time, two thirds of the way through October, I nailed it.

This impressionist scene was shot from my car window.  There were actually a lot of people about.

The Smokies were designated as a national park in 1934.  At the time, hundreds of families lived in the park.  The older folks were grandfathered in and allowed to stay; other families were bought out and relocated.  At any rate, no one homesteads in the park any more, but evidence of the early residents pops up here and there in the forest. 

This shot was taken in Pisgah National Forest, ascending into the Blue Ridge.

Delicate colors and tree trunks.

The undergrowth blazes!

A particularly fine mix of colors on the Blue Ridge Parkway.

Hillsides in the Blue Ridge.

Much of the forest in western North Carolina is a mix of evergreen and deciduous forest.  The dark green of the firs and pines contrasts nicely with the leaves of the maples, poplars, and other deciduous trees.

Late in the day, shadows make the light cool.

There were some showers in the mountains yesterday.  Temperature dropped as low as 37, but no snow.  It will come soon enough.

Yes, the Lizards were here.  The mountains in this region are of course not as high as the ones in the Western US, but they are substantial enough to make their own weather, and make you huff and puff while hiking.

Euro Masters at the Met

Continuing on our look at the Met, here's a Rembrandt self portrait...he painted a lot of them.  He's looking rather curmudgeonly in this depiction.

Jan Steen is one of my favorite Dutch painters.  He painted scenes of everyday people partying, with a good deal of disarray.  In this painting Steen portrays himself at the far left, as the bartender, looking pretty well smashed, I reckon.  In Steen's paintings there is usually an animal up to some mischief, and overturned bottles, and folks making passes at each other.  Par-tay.

A Monet, at his home in Giverny.

Camille Pissarro, at the same time, portrayed urban life in Paris.

Georges Seurat was a pointillist, making pictures by tapping the tip of his brush on the canvas.  From a distance the effect is the same as a low resolution printed picture, also made of thousands of dots.

This is an early Picasso.  Starting in the late 19th century, he had a much more realistic style before he went modern in the 20th century.

Cezanne depicts some card players.

And here's Vincent.  Does anyone paint more vivid skies than Van Gogh?

Gauguin in Tahiti.

Water lilies by Monet, his specialty.

Manet had a name similar to Monet, but a very different style...not really impressionist in many cases.  Here's a straightforward, soulful pic of a guitar player.

More Met

Moving on in the Met, we have paintings by Winslow Homer.  Working in the late 19th/early 20th centuries, Homer appears to have been influenced by the impressionists, without going quite as abstract as some.  He lived in Maine for many years, and knew all the moods of the sea, and depicted them brilliantly.  Here a man in a dismasted dinghy is in a spot of bother, especially with the sharks circling in the gloom.

A nor'easter hits the coast, as depicted by Homer.

Here's a painting of my fav NYC building, the Flatiron!  Painted in 1919, the building had been surpassed by several others as the tallest in town, including the 40 story Woolworth Building, completed circa 1914.  But the Flatiron has flair!

Moving on to old Euro art, here are busts of Julius Caesar (left) and Galba, briefly emperor in AD 68-69 after Nero's demise.  Looks like a WWE staredown to me!

A medieval drinking horn.

A well used helmet.  The museum says it was used either by Byzantines or Ostrogoths circa the 6th/7th centuries AD.  If it could talk, what stories would it tell?  It's interesting that the Byzantines, successors to the Romans, and the Ostrogoths, considered "barbarians" by the Romans, used the same gear.

Suits of armor.  These were made of steel, a fairly scarce commodity in the 16th and 17th centuries.  They weigh 50-70 pounds, maybe a third of the weight of the bloke wearing them, so your potential for making quick moves while so clad was limited.

The horses had their own armor.  Lots of metal clashing.

This was Henry the Eighth's personal armor!  He wore this late in life, when he was portly and plagued by gout.

On to more American art.  This is the famous portrait of George Washington, painted from life by Charles Wilson Peale in 1781.

If the early US government had been a monarchy, Gilbert Stuart would have been the court painter.  He painted Washington many times.  This one is close to the pic on the dollar bill, which was also painted by Stuart.

John Steuart Curry, a Kansan, painted many pictures depicting the dramatic weather of his home state.  Here he combines that (the tornado) with a likeness of John Brown, the ardent anti slavery crusader in the years just before the Civil War.  Brown attempted to seize the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry in 1859 as part of a plan to start an armed insurrection to rid the US of slavery.  His raid failed and he was hanged, but the incident helped send the country toward civil war in 1861.  As Curry's painting shows, Brown was a fanatic about his cause.  Southerners hated him; abolitionists loved him.

Here's Washington crossing the Delaware.  We've all seen this painting in books or on TV shows; it resides in the Met.

I liked this bust of Andrew Jackson.  It shows him as he was; one tough mutha.  And that's the way Jackson liked it; he told the sculptor to be realistic and honest.

More Met

Moving on in the Met, we have paintings by Winslow Homer.  Working in the late 19th/early 20th centuries, Homer appears to have been influenced by the impressionists, without going quite as abstract as some.  He lived in Maine for many years, and knew all the moods of the sea, and depicted them brilliantly.  Here a man in a dismasted dinghy is in a spot of bother, especially with the sharks circling in the gloom.

A nor'easter hits the coast, as depicted by Homer.

Here's a painting of my fav NYC building, the Flatiron!  Painted in 1919, the building had been surpassed by several others as the tallest in town, including the 40 story Woolworth Building, completed circa 1914.  But the Flatiron has flair!

Moving on to old Euro art, here are busts of Julius Caesar (left) and Galba, briefly emperor in AD 68-69 after Nero's demise.  Looks like a WWE staredown to me!

A medieval drinking horn.

A well used helmet.  The museum says it was used either by Byzantines or Ostrogoths circa the 6th/7th centuries AD.  If it could talk, what stories would it tell?  It's interesting that the Byzantines, successors to the Romans, and the Ostrogoths, considered "barbarians" by the Romans, used the same gear.

Suits of armor.  These were made of steel, a fairly scarce commodity in the 16th and 17th centuries.  They weigh 50-70 pounds, maybe a third of the weight of the bloke wearing them, so your potential for making quick moves while so clad was limited.

The horses had their own armor.  Lots of metal clashing.

This was Henry the Eighth's personal armor!  He wore this late in life, when he was portly and plagued by gout.

On to more American art.  This is the famous portrait of George Washington, painted from life by Charles Wilson Peale in 1781.

If the early US government had been a monarchy, Gilbert Stuart would have been the court painter.  He painted Washington many times.  This one is close to the pic on the dollar bill, which was also painted by Stuart.

John Steuart Curry, a Kansan, painted many pictures depicting the dramatic weather of his home state.  Here he combines that (the tornado) with a likeness of John Brown, the ardent anti slavery crusader in the years just before the Civil War.  Brown attempted to seize the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry in 1859 as part of a plan to start an armed insurrection to rid the US of slavery.  His raid failed and he was hanged, but the incident helped send the country toward civil war in 1861.  As Curry's painting shows, Brown was a fanatic about his cause.  Southerners hated him; abolitionists loved him.

Here's Washington crossing the Delaware.  We've all seen this painting in books or on TV shows; it resides in the Met.

I liked this bust of Andrew Jackson.  It shows him as he was; one tough mutha.  And that's the way Jackson liked it; he told the sculptor to be realistic and honest.