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Milwaukee Art Museum

I returned recently from my first visit to Milwaukee, Wisconsin. It’s a city that deserves attention for its history, the energy and innovation of its people, and its respect for education and the arts.

I enjoyed my visits to cafés, coffee shops, art galleries, museums, and Marquette University. 

I spent two days at the Milwaukee Art Museum, an institution on the shore of Lake Michigan which is home to more than  25,000 works of art and is itself a work of art. Its Quadracci Pavilion contains a movable, wing-like brise-soleil that opens up a wingspan of 66 m (217 Feet) during the day, folding over the tall, arched structure at night or during inclement weather.

The Milwaukee Art Museum contains one of the largest collection of the work of Wisconsin native Georgia O’Keefe as well as works by well known artists including Winslow Homer, Auguste Rodin, Edgar Degas, Claude Monet, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Frank Lloyd Wright, Pablo Picasso, Wassily Kandinsky, Mark Rothko, Andy Warhol and many others. 

Fine food, great art, friendly and helpful staff: it’s my kind of place.

I’ll be back.

It's Autumn in Farming Country

While spring in North America and many other areas of the world is usually an exciting season, with warm days and plants which reach for the sun after waiting patiently all winter, most people feel that summer is the ultimate season: students and most other people take summer holidays to travel or to enjoy spending days or weeks near large bodies of water.

This morning when I went into our vegetable garden the air smelled like Fall (Autumn): crisp and cool. Fall is my favourite season. It's that time of year.

The sky was clear, without the haze that summer rains create, and the smell of maturing plants told me that it was harvest time for gardeners and farmers. Farmers would soon be in their fields, harvesting grain and storing it in their granaries. If I were still living with my parents on the family farm my father and I would be working on his combine, getting it ready for the busy harvest season.

While farmers are happy to have rain at almost any time during the year they would prefer to have it before or after harvest. After a particular date rain does not necessarily result in greater yields, but it may cause damage to the crop and delays in getting it into the bins without it being too high in moisture to be stored safely.

Shadows are long at the end of the day. One last load into the granary, then a late dinner and an early bedtime. 

It's time to drive through farming country, watching combines move up and down the fields while trucks wait patiently for their loads of grain. It's time to stop and make photographs of the harvest landscape, of the farmers and their families watching for rain, of truck drivers counting the loads that they have brought into the yard and elevated into metal bins for later sale.

It's that time of year.

Landscapes by Jerome Martin: 23-25 of 50

 

 

 

Landscapes by Jerome Martin: 21-22 of 50

 

 

Celebrating the wonderful Elizabeth Merle Whyte Martin (1940 - 2018)

Landscapes by Jerome Martin: 18-20 of 50

 

 

 

Landscapes by Jerome Martin: 15 – 17 of 50

 

 

Landscapes by Jerome Martin: 12 – 14 of 50

 

 

Landscapes By Jerome Martin: Numbers 9 –11 of 50

 

 

 

Landscapes by Jerome Martin: Number 8 of 50