Jacksonville Florida and Thomas Hart Benton

 Saturday 2.24.2018

Whenever we asked about Jacksonville, at the Florida Welcome Center, Tourist Information or people we met, we got an hesitating answer like: well, there is the Zoo, the Cummer Museum and that's about it...
Since we were not interested in a zoo, we nearly skipped it, but Marcia mentioned an arts and farmers market under a bridge and I adopted it immediately!
On Saturday morning we headed to Jacksonville. We parked the car near Cummer Museum and walked towards the high bridge near by. Under the bridge we found a lovely arts market with some food vendors.

http://ram.riversideavondale.org/

A guy was making wood signs by burning a piece of driftwood using the solar irradiation with a huge focusing Fresnel lens.

The huge lens

See the flame burning the wood!

 Cummer Museum of Art & Gardens, a fine art museum with varied collection of artifacts from Egyptian and Greek archeology, porcelain collection, classic art to modern paintings.

Andy Warhol

To my surprise I found here a marvelous collection of Navy life works during WW2 by Thomas Hart Benton, the famous Missourian painter that we became familiar with while living in Columbia MO.

http://www.cummermuseum.org/visit/art/exhibition/thomas-hart-benton-navy
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Hart_Benton_(painter)