I looked through pages and pages of stock photos online for a work project, and felt my usual irritation that creative people aren’t paid nearly enough for their work, and my further irritation that I can never seem to find exactly what I want in those stock photos.
Of course some of my irritation could be from too much work and not enough play. I decided to go home early, but my car took a left instead of a right out of the parking lot. I drove into the big city to Lakeview Cemetery.
Lakeview was created in a time of huge wealth in Cleveland, when cemeteries were parks for the unwashed masses to stroll around in and admire. Us regular folk still like to stroll around there. It really is like a park, with lots of trees and serenity and sculptures. We wander around the winding drives and try to find weeping angels and tour the tomb of President James A. Garfield.
I suspect nobody outside of the area even knows who President Garfield was, but he was a local boy, so he got a grand tomb. He became president in 1881, and was assassinated in the same year. I don’t think he really did much in his 4 months of office, or during his 2 months of lingering death after getting shot, but he’s got a beautiful building for his remains with an excellent view of Lake Erie.
Garfield’s tomb and Wade Chapel are both on the national register of historic places. The chapel is a small building, but it’s stunning. There are windows by Louis Comfort Tiffany, and there are spectacular mosaics on the walls of Old Testament prophets by Fredrick Wilson of Tiffany Studios. Seeing Tiffany masterpieces is like seeing Van Gogh paintings in person. When you study that kind of thing in books or slides in a lecture, it’s hard to see what the fuss is all about. When you see Tiffany masterpieces in the light they were designed to be in – well, it can take your breath away. Gorgeous.
My original idea in going to Lakeview was what’s more “hybrid” than an angel? And I knew just where to find them. How lucky am I to have such a spectacular cemetery to spend some time shooting better angles of angels for that work project too. Okay, so I didn’t limit myself to angels and took pictures of a lot of sculptures, angels or not.
I used the work camera which is, em, limited, so my apologies to my photography friends for the lack of technical brilliance with these photos. I’ll fiddle them in PhotoShop for that work project. The angel doodle is part of the fine layout I did. Sometimes I like these little drawings better than the finished product.
And for those of you who use Blogger, what's up with it this weekend?! This was ssoooooo hard to post today!
