Carriage House

The Tudor-style Carriage House at Jesse Lee United Methodist Church in Ridgefield is used for meetings on the first floor.  It has offices on the second floor. 

"Your Taxes are Due"

 And I don't even live in Bridgewater!

Sunny Meadow Farm

 

Bridgewater, Connecticut.

The Line-Up

 

A lazy July afternoon.

Linked to Weekend Street/Reflections.

Eastern Tiger Swallowtail

 There have been a gazillion bees, but now butterflies are showing up.

Seven Cousins for a Horse

A local company, Thrown Stone Theater Company, has just finished the run for its newest play.

The play and the performances got great local reviews. 

Seven Cousins for a Horse is about the prolific portrait painter, Ammi Phillips, who rode around Connecticut, Massachusetts and New York for the fifty years between 1810 and the early 1860s, painting more than 2,000 portraits.  Phillips' portraits today hang in many of the country's best museums.

Roie

You are Roie if your little sister can't pronounce Rosemary when you were both young.

Now retired, Roie was a nurse.  She also gives psychic readings.  

I met her when she was on one of her long daily walks.

 

Yellow Victorian

A pretty yellow Victorian house sits on Main Street in Kent, Connecticut.

 I grew up in a yellow Victorian house, so I am partial to them.

First Congregational Church of Kent

 

White Protestant churches are all over New England.  

This church on Kent's main street is a bit fancier than most.

Bulls Bridge

 The Housatonic River in western Connecticut is raging after all the rain we have had.

It is overflowing Bulls Bridge's dam.  Bulls Bridge is a 7 megawatt hydroelectric plant.

Carousel Museum

 After we finished at New Britain Museum of Art, we were only 20 minutes away from the Carousel Museum in Bristol.  So we went.

It turns out that not all carousel animals are horses.

Even pigs and tigers.

One area was devoted to animals in the process of being repaired and painted.

There was even a working carousel for kids to ride, accompanied by earsplittingly loud music.

I particularly liked this donkey.

New Britain Museum of Art

 After seeing the Walter Wick exhibition featured in yesterday's post, we walked through the rest of NBMAA.

The late conceptual artist Sol Lewitt grew up in New Britain.  The stairwell between the museum's first and second floors is named for his family.  Works by different artists fill the stairwell for a couple of years at a time.  I was delighted that the current works are by his daughter, Eva Lewitt, a fabric artist. 

A full room is devoted to paintings by Thomas Hart Benton that once graced other walls.

I'll let viewers supply their own captions for this 2016 silkscreen by Deborah Kass.

I love Porcelain Promises, a 2008 pair of photographs by Israeli artist Drew Tal.  He digitally superimposed cracks from porcelain over their faces to give them a timeliness.

Down in the lower level, the girls found an area for children to create.

The six year old likes to write but let's not worry about whether it says or means anything.

Walter Wick

Walter Wick's children's books -- the "I Spy" and the "Can You See What I see?" series -- are colorfully illustrated with photographs of the richly detailed worlds he creates. 

 

The New Britain Museum of American Art is presenting a summer-long Wick exhibition.  

There are many photographs from his books and numerous displays of the intricate miniatures that he photographs.

Well spent time with eight and six year old granddaughters.

Brown

 

A simple brown shingled house with an American flag.  Just across the state line in New York.

Two dogs

 

My mind goes toward symmetry, even when it is not perfect symmetry.  

I can't help it.  It is how I was made.

Around the Yard Yesterday

The bees are active in my pollinator garden.

Not many butterflies yet, but a great spangled fritillary did join them.

As did an orange dragonfly.

A Carolina wren by one app and a marsh wren by another.

There were also hummingbirds, other small birds, chipmunks, etc., but they were too quick for me in the time I was willing to devote.

Spread Kindness With Music

 But would the person who took the gnome please bring it back?

Putnam Park

 Putnam Park is in West Redding.  It is the site of winter encampments in 1788-1789 by a force of Revolutionary War soldiers led by General Israel Putnam.

General Israel Putnam was from my old home town in Massachusetts.  It always catches me off guard when I come across something memorializing Putnam. 

The troops camped in Redding were used to protect the Long Island Sound, the Hudson Highlands and, especially, the military stores at the Army Supply Depot in Danbury.  There is a field with a quarter mile of rock piles, which are the remains of the chimneys of 116 log huts that housed the soldiers.

The statue is by a noted female Connecticut sculptor, a wealthy woman who had an estate near here.  Anna Hyatt Huntington donated it to the State of Connecticut in 1969, when she was 93.

Honor Garden

I often go past a red shed, with pots of plants for sale in front.  

There is no way they can make a living from this, but I like seeing it as I pass by.  

Frankie Vinci

 Ridgefield's Colabella Fine Art Gallery is opening a new and colorful exhibition today.

Frankie Vinci is a versatile songwriter, singer, composer, producer and pop art/mixed media artist.

I predict that many of the works in the exhibition will have red "sold" dots in the first few days.

CHIRP

Concerts Happening In Ridgefield Parks -- CHIRP -- presents concerts in Ballard Park.

 Every Tuesday and Thursday evening, all summer long.

In the middle school auditorium when it rains. 

Last evening The Faux Paws performed.  They are a good kind-of-bluegrass-but-not-exactly band.

There is always some kid dancing frantically.

The Hickories Farm

 Back in Connecticut after a wonderful week on a New Hampshire lake with my family.

The Hickories is a Ridgefield organic farm that has been in the same family for generations.  They graze sheep (from which they make excellent wool products), grow flowers and vegetables, and in recent years have made a big push into sustainable farming and growing hyperlocal varieties.

  I like the simplicity of the place.  And I like supporting local businesses.