A Day in Forest Park

Pardon me if I take this opportunity to post another picture of our grandson.  Last week we had a wonderful time with Nathan and his mother, and being in a small motor home with a toddler is no problem at all!  He adjusted well, as long as we let him have the run of the place.  He certainly was not willing to let us have our space, how quickly he learned to hop on our bed when it came to bedtime reading!

My sister Gloria also came to town from Nebraska.  Last Tuesday we had a wonderful end-of-summer cool day to spend in Forest Park.  John and I had not seen the new East Building of the Saint Louis Art Museum, which had been built in 2013.  That part of the museum has the contemporary art exhibits.  We enjoyed that immensely- I am slowly beginning to appreciate modern art!  Of special interest to me were the paintings by German artists after WW11.  True, they are dark and foreboding, but they certainly express the mood of that country after the Third Reich had fallen.

The Museum now has an outdoor sculpture garden which showcases modern and contemporary sculpture.  Pictured above is Stone Sea done by Andy Goldsworth in 2012.  The 25 stone arches, each measuring 10 feet high, are made from Missouri limestone.  The artist employed ancient Roman dry stone engineering when building this inspiration taken from the geology history of St.Louis.

My sister Gloria  posed in front of another modern sculpture called "Phrygian Cap".   Alexander Calder is the pioneer of hanging kinetic sculptures known as mobiles.  He also made stationary works called "stabiles", which sit on the ground.  A Phrygian Cap sits atop the sculpture, it was a style of hat that was a symbol of liberty during the French Revolution of 1789.

After a wonderful lunch at the Boathouse Restaurant Forest Park, we headed over to the St.Louis Zoo.  The first place we stopped there was the Children's Zoo.  At the entrance to that section of the zoo we saw a beautiful plant with yellow flowers.  An employee of the zoo informed us that it is a Mexican popcorn plant, and encouraged us to rub the leaves.  We did and it smells just like buttered popcorn!   A first for us at the Children's Zoo was a tree kangaroo, pictured below.  It was getting to be late in the afternoon by the time we arrived at the zoo, consequently we had to call it a day.  All I can say is that both the art museum as well as the zoo continue to pleasantly surprise us- they are attractions which St.Louis can be proud of!