Windsor chair with table and reflections, Highfield Hall and Gardens, Falmouth, MA. (c) DE Wolf 2016.

Today I wanted to share another interior image that I took at Highfield Hall and Gardens this past Sunday.  This photograph is a geometric interior shot. Because it is of such concrete definition, I would not refer to it as an abstraction. I think that lying within the nature of our minds is a love of the geometric. Geometry is both soothing and defining of boundaries. There is an appeal to the ordered. It mirrors the stability that we wish of our lives.

I read recently about a couple of parallel lines found on an ancient animal bone and suddenly we had the earliest evidence of humans in North America. In that respect the geometric is “of mankind,” and such is certainly the case here with this chair, the window blinds and their reflections. But it is ultimately the case that we learn geometry, structure, and order from the natural world. A pine barren with a straight and rigid line of parallel trees, a flower, a stair fish, and, of course, the random pattern of the stars that we mentally group into constellations.

Behold the Great Bear and his lesser buddy “The Little Bear,” you say? I can see a dipper, but a bear? It is the product of an over active imagination perhaps – but most significantly it is of a human imagination.

With regard to my photograph, I was taken by the parallel reflections – a physicist’s delight. I love the warm glow and the tonal range. And it is wonderful to be in a museum filled with wonderful art and to suddenly focus instead on the beauty of the mundane and everyday – here the furniture in the library. Specifically it is the most utilitarian of furniture. Yet the Windsor chair is ever a thing of great beauty.

Canon T2i with EF70-200mm f/4L USM lens at 70mm , ISO 1600, Aperture Priority AE Mode, 1/320th sec at f/7.1 with -1 exposure compensation.