December 1, part 2

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The "Farquod's castle" part of the Denver Art Museum has free lockers for your coat and whatnot.  (Unlike the mint, which has no provision for the stuff it prohibits you from carrying in......)



The art museum also has singing sinks in the nearby women's room!  I was charmed to begin to wash my hands, only to have the sink sing part of "Row, row, row your boat" to me!  I remarked to the other woman in the room that I'd never had a sink sing to me before, and she showed me that if I got all of the sinks singing at once, I'd hear the round in action.  What a fun and clever idea!

Thank you, Polly and Mark Addison, for adding this fun and entertaining piece to the ladies' room!

I took the elevator up to the top of the "castle."  It is lovely to visit museums and other venues when most of the public is elsewhere!  I found a beautiful little room up there that was utterly empty of other humanity.  Peaceful.  Quiet.  It had what looked like a comfy couch.

I did not sit; I had just gotten there.  But what a nice haven to discover!



Remember we saw a rounded space cut out of the top wall of the "castle" from the hotel-room window?  There are multiple similar cut-outs.  Mountains framed here.

I bet this is the cut-out we could see from the hotel room..........  Mountains, again, and the county-building's tower, as well as a bunch of other buildings...........

Many windows in this building have nice views of the state capital.  (Mountains, west.  State capital, east.)

I think the white building at right with the stripes of black windows is the state supreme court.  Just closer to us, in many shapes, is the library.  I believe that's a child's (enormous) red chair in front of the library.  There's a painted pony standing on the chair.


We can see a place to cross the curvy street.  If we head north across that street (left, in this image), that's my way back to the hotel.

Golden dome on a sunny day.

Another long skinny window framing a view.  With wooden steps conveniently placed.

Portrait of Chief Blackbird.  Adolf Weinman, 1903.

Chief Blue Horse.  Elbridge Burbank.  About 1898.

He looks to me like a person who has seen things no one would ever want to see.

A view toward the art museum's other building.  We can clearly see the bridge across the street (from which I took several pics when I visited the museum before).

This view of the state capital, library, et al, shows the entry to the park that is my way back to the hotel.

Martin Hennings.  Flight.  About 1947.

A closer look.

One of my daughter's college art-history classes was about museum design.  I hadn't thought about it until she talked about taking the class, but of course every decision affects how people perceive the art.  The size and shape of rooms, the arrangement of paintings (next to what else, as one example of a consideration), the wall color............

I still don't usually give much thought to the design of spaces and/or exhibits, but when I see walls that are a brilliant color, I think about the fact that someone chose that color on purpose, and I wonder how it affects how people see the art (thinking about those red walls in the Wyeth exhibit....)......

Anne Knollys was a second cousin of Queen Elizabeth I of England.  Robert Peake.  1582.

The above was taken with the camera.  This one was taken with the phone.

I need to work at remembering that the phone does a better job in low-light conditions than the camera......

Here's a close-up -- look what a great job the phone did with the details!

Another look out another window.  That curvy line at the bottom is the football stadium.  It was all lit up at least a couple different evenings while we were there (we could see it from our hotel room).

Mountains, and clouds.

Jar.  This was about 10" tall.  I think I like the drips of iron-rich brown.......  I definitely like the shape and the incised lines on the shoulder.  Thailand.  1300s-1400s.

I failed to get the info that goes with this next piece.  The hair looks sort of Mesopotamian, but I don't remember seeing such realistic bird faces on human bodies anywhere near the Mediterranean. 

Well -- the museum site's search didn't find any info, but google knows..........  (Side note -- google makes searching look so easy.  But a few searches using someone else's algorithms -- my local library's internal search, say -- and one realizes that searching must be a lot harder than google leads us to believe, as other searches Just. Do. Not. Work.  Google is clearly full of searching geniuses.  Aren't we lucky to be able to use their work for free any time we like??  Thank you, Google, for showing us how searching ought to work!)

Iraq. 885 BCE.

As you see, we are descending within the museum.  These views are from lower and lower vantage points.......

Another skinny window, another comfortable place to sit.  I saw more comfortable seating in this building of this art museum than in all the other art museums I've ever visited, I think.

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