D.C. Fly-In, Part Three: Art and Design Experience

The re-cap blog posts I have done on our Washington D.C. trip have been really popular. Thanks everyone for reading! The third and final installment of my Washington D.C. Re-caps will focus on art and design that I experienced in the city. I was actually an Apparel Design major in college, and love art and design in general. Cities are really great for me to fill the art and design void that sometimes is a little harder to fill living where I do. Thanks to my husband for indulging my want/need to visit art museums every time we go to large cities!

We did spend a very brief hour or so in the National Gallery while in Washington. I had been there once before, but was again impressed with the scope of works we as a nation own. So cool to be able to see priceless masterpieces for FREE!! Two paintings that I really loved on this trip were this harbor/boat scene by Joseph Mallord and William Turner, and of course, the Van Gogh.

The Van Gogh has really lovely colors and movement, as many of his paintings do, and is actually an impression of a wheat field. As a wheat farmer, this was appealing to me, too. This painting was a recent acquisition by the gallery, and a really lovely one at that.

Photos of paintings are somewhat pointless-- simply don't do justice to a masterpiece. 

I also love modern sculpture, and DC had a lot of it. The spiky tower thingy (probably not the actual name of this work... sorry!) in front of the Air and Space museum is really great, and also a nice meeting point if you're meeting up with friends or a group. 

Can you spot Jeff? 

I also wrote in the last post that I really, really enjoyed the Air Force Memorial. I just think it is such a graceful, beautiful structure. Again, photos don't do justice. And, it's maybe harder to see at night? In person, I actually thought the way it was lit up at night made it look even more beautiful.

Something about this giant monument was very tactile, too, even though it was huge. I just kept feeling the want to touch it. It's made of a very, very smooth metal of some sort.

I also took a lot of photos of landscaping and plants. Many of the public sidewalks and right-of-ways were landscaped beautifully and thoughtfully, and maintained very well. I color combination I saw a lot of was reds and greens together, in various iterations.

Our return trip from DC went well, too, even though we had a very, very tight layover in Salt Lake. For the second time in my life, I found myself literally running through the airport in order to make the flight. Jeff got to the gate ahead of me and let them know we were there. Our flight from DC to SLC had arrived late, and thankfully the good people of Delta at the Salt Lake airport, actually held the plane from SLC to Great Falls just for us! Even so, we barely made it on time. Pretty glad it worked out.

We landed in Great Falls at about 10:00 p.m. and were greated by... SNOW! Some welcome back to Montana, huh?! We drove home in a wintry mix for the next 2.5 hours. The next morning I snapped this photo of the Sweetgrass Hills:

SNOW?!?!

Hard to believe just a few days prior to this photo being taken, we were sweating it out in 95 degree heat and humidity!

It's always so great to get a city fix when traveling, but it's also always so wonderful to be home. Montana is so beautiful, in every season.