We had the good fortune of going to the Getty Museum today.  The traffic was terrible on the way there. My daughter told me the reason for this: nobody works in LA, so traffic is heavy, no matter what time of day one decides to take the freeway.

There was a Rubens painting exhibit, which was very impressive, but I enjoyed the gallery in which the drawings of Rubens and his contemporaries were on display much more. They were breathtaking in their intricacy. The gallery even provided magnifying glasses for the patrons to get a better look at the details.

However, I’m always itching to make my own creations. I neglected to bring a sketch pad, but I did have my camera. I’m sure that my encounter with the “Mystery Leaf” a couple of days ago made me more likely to notice leaves, but the leaf below almost jumped out at me. It was enormous.

The photograph below was posed, I’m afraid to say.

My next encounter was with the same type of leaf was under wetter conditions, under water, in fact:

Finally, I discovered this leaf below. It is of the same type as the other two, but I captured it in situ-ish. I moved it to a different dusty place from where it originally lay, to a more private location, away from pedestrians who may have crunched it underfoot.

It is autumn, even in Los Angeles. We get some of the colors that one sees in the Northeast US, but nowhere near the same scale.

But we still get leaves that fall.

A big thank you:

I would like to thank Starsmedicine McQuinn for identifying the mystery leaf in both incarnations. It was a castor bean plant!