Phoenix, Arizona.

This week Ann-Christine asks us to share something demonstrating creativity and her post features some beautiful floral floats from an annual parade in The Netherlands. You can read her entire challenge post here. As it happens, only a few weeks ago in my regular “Travel Tuesday” post, I featured a visit to the Dwarf Car Museum, a place where creativity in metal and motors is on display. The cars on display there are built by a small number of craftsmen, the concept created by Ernie Adams. In the opening image, Gene Tweedy poses by his mid-1950’s dwarf Chevrolet. These beautiful 11/16th scale displays of craftsmanship are fully road worthy and powered by small 4-cylinder automobile engines.

In the shadow of South Mountain lies an 18-room castle hand built by Boyce Luther Gulley over a 15-year period, 1930 until his death in 1945. He constructed his castle of mostly recycled products and dedicated it to his daughter Mary Lou. It is open daily for tours and contains many other creative enhancements that I will feature in an upcoming Travel Tuesday episode.

Another creative wonder in the Phoenix metropolitan area is Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin West. Wright’s combination winter home and school of architecture is open for tours and the school is still training architects. Several tours feature everything from an hour-long overview to more extensive detailed tours focusing on various elements of Wright’s time and life’s work.

My last example of creativity features a depiction in quilt art, a mixed media form featuring modern quilting techniques to create an art object, in this case a depiction of a photograph. If this image looks familiar, it’s because I featured it only this week on my Travel Tuesday post. One of our friends, Joan Jennings, is a devotee of the medium and works in the medium as a painter works in oil or water color. This image is special to me as it depicts a sunset photo that I captured one winter evening here in Arizona. Joan recreated that image in quilted media choosing various materials and applying sewing patterns to give her impression of the image I created with a camera and photo processing software. For comparative reference, my last image in this post features that original photo that Joan used to inspire her quilt art.

John Steiner