Here are a few pictures from the trip that Lance and his sister took to visit his niece and her family in Seattle, traveling with them over to Victoria, BC. The pictures mostly focus on our visits to museums, gardens, and chapels, but we started in Seattle with some normal tourist sites, including the Space Needle (left over from the 1962 World's Fair). You can look down through the glass floor of the rotating restaurant and see the gears that rotate it once each hour. The monorail from that World's Fair is still running, connecting the Needle to downtown. (The "rail" is a concrete beam, and the cars have support wheels that run along the top of the beam and stabilizing wheels that run along the sides of the beam.)
The Seattle Art Museum has a substantial exhibit of Northwest Native American art, including this recent plate.
This bowl and hat are older. For the woven pieces, the custom apparently was that the women did the weaving that the men later painted.
I was also struck by this fine piece by Jeffrey Gibson, a contemporary Choctaw/Cherokee artist.
They also had a large exhibit of Aboriginal Australian art, large paintings on eucalyptus tree bark of a type that I'd never seen before. Here are a couple examples, including a detailed view of part of the second.
They also etch designs into aluminum. In the second example here, the artist started with an old road sign leaving fragments of the original lettering.
That museum was also currently hosting a major exhibition of work by Ai Wei Wei, a contemporary Chinese artist and activist who has also spent time in the US and in Europe. The wide range of his work includes political protest pieces, some of which were included in this exhibition, like a picture of himself in front of the Great Hall of the People with his shirt raised to display a large 4-letter-word tatoo, but my pictures here focus on less political pieces, including some amazing woodwork. The geometrical sphere was apparently assembled without fasteners or glue, and the double table certainly carries a message, though not a political one.
The tree was bolted together from fragments of various trees, some found by the roadside, the snake hanging from the ceiling was made from 857 cloth backpacks, and the third piece here came from assembling bicycle frames.
Seattle also has a museum devoted to the local glassbower artist Dale Chichuly, including displays relating his work to native NW art, and a garden with flowers to match his spiraling glass pieces.
I was most taken by pieces like this vase, with a design in glass on the outside, and these open bowls made from three layers of glass, with different patterns inside and out.
We also visited the Royal BC Museum in Victoria. It has an impressive exhibit of totem poles, but since I don't know very much about them and the outside ones are not easy to photograph, I'm limiting myself here to just a couple examples.
The museum also had a special exhibit on chintz, originally Indian hand-dyed, painted, or woodblock-printed calico cloth. The name comes from "chint", a Hindi word meaning variegated or patterned, and it began as a luxury import, as in this early sample. Only after the British had figured out how to make cheap factory imitations did the word develop its current negative connotations.
Another focus of our time in Victoria was gardens, including the famous Butchart gardens. The hanging baskets around the entrance courtyard and the large areas of color give a sense of its "more is more" approach.
This sunken garden was Mrs. Butchart's reuse of an abandoned quarry. I was also struck by their frequent use of planted pond lillies, artistically arranged like bouquets in the water, rather than growing randomly.
We also visited a garden maintained by volunteers from the Victoria Horticultural Society. The plantings here were on a smaller scale, but actually more interesting.
They had a fine Japanese garden, and a large bonsai collection.
They were working on some of the bonsai. One was propped up to get it to change direction, another had hanging wires to pull the branches down, and a third had spiral wires wrapped around the branches to shape them.
Also in Victoria, we visited a butterfly garden. They set out cut fruit, which gave a better chance to take pictures. The blue morpho in the first shot has wings that are brilliant blue on top, obvious when it flies and shocking to any preditors when it opens its wings, but difficult to catch in a photograph.
And here's a butterfly just breaking out of its crysalis.
They took advantage of a large enclosure kept in topical conditions to shelter numerous other animals, birds, turtles, and lizards, mostly rescue cases.
We also visited a couple chapels. The Chapel of St. Ignatius on the Seattle University campus is an architectural tour de force. There is no flat surface (other than the floor), and the light comes either through colored glass panes or through clear glass panes but then reflected off of hidden colored painted walls.
The furniture and art are all carefully customized. It's very impressive, though one review that Elaine had read commented that it gave a bit of the sense that we're here to worship the architect!
Another chapel that we saw was of interest to Elaine because it was a downtown church that built a new building on their land with a new sanctuary in exactly the old space, but now with six floors of workforce housing above and a homeless shelter in the basement. Elaine's church may decide to do something similar. Note again the use of solid-colored glass, giving some of the feel of traditional stained glass.
And one bookstore had quite an impressive puzzle. Shelved near their normal 1000- and 2000-piece puzzles was this 6' x 2' x 2' box containing 30,200 pieces, the combined pieces from ten 3000-piece puzzzles. Only $600 Canadian, plus the cost to build a 12' x 4' table.
We also saw a bit of the Vistoria beach front. There's an analemma sundial there where your shadow forms the gnomen. Our nephew's shadow here points to a few minutes past 1:00 sun time, and it was then about 2:15 PDT.
As one does in Victoria, we had afternoon tea one day. (You start on the bottom platform and work your way up.) I was also struck by the "stage barge" that they tie up just opposite the shore for summer performances with the audience on the shore-front. And this peacock was crossing the road in the nearby park.
All in all, quite a fine trip!