Day 10 - 6/30

Today we went to the Art Institute of Chicago. It was absolutely amazing! SAM (Seattle Art Museum) is fun to go to, but this museum had so much wonderful art. We saw many Monet's, Renoir's, Cezanne's, etc. I love the Japanese Water Bridge Monet painted. What he would do is find a subject to paint, and then painted at different periods throughout a year. This creates many painting that look similar, but the surroundings are different. Mom likes the Renoir's a lot. One of her favorites was Two Sisters. Another painting we saw was La Grande Jatte by Georges Seurat. He used a technique called pointillism. The painter would make many, many dots of different colors to form the desired image. Up close, it looks like a bunch of dots, but when the viewer stands back, a beautiful image comes together. I also liked the still life paintings Cezanne painted. In these, the subject was usually a bowl of fruit or a pitcher. These types of painting were in high demand when they were painted. So much so, that Monet painted more still life paintings than landscapes. Cezanne's paintings though we still very pretty and enjoyable to look at. We also saw some El Greco that Dad liked a lot. I also saw a room with gigantic paintings of Biblical stories. The reason they are so big is because they used to be in churches. One of them was about 20 feet by 8 feet. Or in other words, it was bigger than the waterfall we saw when we were in Wisconsin. And, of course, we saw American Gothic by Grant Wood. The farmer in the picture was Wood's dentist. The Art Institute is having a special exhibit featuring Roy Lichtenstein's work. He was a pop artist in the 60's. Many of his works look like comic books. He would also take famous paintings and then using his pop art style recreate them. The kids enjoyed looking at his art a lot.

After the museum, we went to get some Chicago dogs at my request. I've always wanted to try an authentic Chicago dog in Chicago. It consists of a celery seed bun, a hotdog, tomato, jalapeño peppers, pickle, onions and relish. It was super delicious! Even though the peppers were a little hot for me, it was still worth it to eat. After traveling some more and a brief stop at Wal-Mart we made it to our hotel near Cleveland, Ohio.