Art, horsemanship, and other poorly photographed things

 I feel like I haven't been taking as many pictures lately, or not any good ones, but I've decided that shouldn't stop me from blogging. There's a particularly photogenic part of my last couple of weeks, that I don't think I'll ever be able to capture. I've been taking horseback riding lessons (well really just a four week class) at these stables a 15-minute drive south of us. (As a side note: one of the things I love about Austin is that I can drive 15 minutes one direction and be in the heart of downtown and 15 minutes another and be in the middle of the country). The drive down is pretty unremarkable until you turn off onto a narrow gravel road that leads down to the stables. You have to drive 10 miles an hour for most of it as horses roam freely in the area. To one side there's a random emu farm which currently has the cutest little emu chicks, or more like adolescent emus, running around. Past that there's a beautiful field of wildflowers. Perhaps I've belabored this point too much already, but the wildflowers are really killing it this year. Due to driving, I'm unable to photograph any of this. I did however manage this poorly captured image while trying to take a photo of the horse way in the background bathed in light:

So you can't actually see the horse I was trying to photograph, but he's back there. 

In other mostly un-photographed moments from the weekend, I met a friend at a gallery show on Saturday night. The theme of the show was "bees" in that all the work was made with encaustic (beeswax based paint) and also featured bees in the images. They also had some lives bees there on display. I wasn't so impressed with the works themselves, but I did feel like I learned a bit about bees. Also, it was a fun night because it turned out that gallery was part of a little nest of galleries, so we were able to do a little gallery hopping. One of the openings had a person mixing very nice, fancy cocktails, which was a nice step up from the usual wine in plastic cups at these things.

This was a bunch of flowers hanging between the galleries, that I thought looked cool. Now I'm not so sure.

In other art news, Sam and I ventured downtown to check out Austin's Contemporary Art Museum. I wasn't terribly impressed. It has quite a small exhibit space and no permanent collection. I think it goes down with PS1 in Long Island City as one of those museums where the building is much cooler than the art inside it.

Contemporary art, such as it is. 

I feel this post is a bit meandering. I also still feel like if I'd taken better photos that that might have saved things. Perhaps that's something I'll work on this week, or perhaps I'll just write something more interesting.