Art Trip to LA

As soon as I completed my new studio, I left for LA for a week of making and looking at art and visiting friends. The day I arrived, my friend Soobin and I attended a Life Drawing session at ArtShareLA. It was fun to draw from the figure and also have a tasty dinner at Urth Cafe.

 

 

 

I stayed at a great apartment a block from Echo Park. Echo Lake is in Echo Park and is very close to downtown LA. I'm not sure if Echo Lake is actually a lake, it seems more like a large urban pond. But, they are restoring habitat in the lake and there was a great variety of birds enjoying the water that was also home to turtles and fish. The last full day I was in LA a movie was being shot in the park. I started each day with a walk around the lake. 

The rest of the week in LA I went to numerous galleries and museums. I visited the Getty Center and the Getty Villa in Malibu with my friend Kellie who does conservation work their. There are amazing vistas from the Getty Center. In fact, I made a gouache painting of one of the views - see below. Its hard to see in the digital version, but there is one more mountain behind the blue one. I did spend a couple hours a day either writing or painting. I also spent several hours eating every day.

On two days I visited galleries. I spent time in Santa Monica at Bergamot Station where several galleries and a nice cafe are located. I visited these galleries with my niece (once-removed?) Megan, who lives in LA. We had a lot of fun catching up with each other and looking at art together. She likes anything with animals in it. On another day I visited galleries in Culver City with my friend Soobin. At first I thought Culver City was going to be disappointing. The first couple of galleries were closed or had moved. Galleries that were supposed to be just across the street didn't appear to exist. We eventually found an open gallery, Fresh Paint Gallery. The owner was very nice and he ended up giving me two free VIP tickets to the 2019 LA Art Show at the convention center for the next day. He directed us to several other galleries that were open. At first it seemed like I was going to have to apologize for dragging Soobin out to an area that had no art, but it ended up being the find of the week. If you do go to LA to look at galleries, I definitely recommend the ones in Culver City near Washington and La Cienega Blvd. The same day that Soobin and I visited the galleries, she had reserved tickets for the Ai Wei Wei exhibit at the Marciano Art Foundation. It is a much bigger museum than expected and the Ai Wei Wei exhibit was outstanding. Much of the exhibit consisted of a boat and mythological creatures made with bamboo and silk using kite making techniques. He also had two large pieces, one of broken teapot spouts and one made of 50 million sunflower seeds on the floor in a large rectangle with beveled edges. The sunflower seed piece was particularly impressive in the Art Brute exhibit space.

My other couple of days in LA were also filled with art. I caught up with old college friends Jim and Nancy. We went out for lunch near the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA). Nancy is the director at LACMA and she was kind to catch up with us between meetings. After lunch, Jim and I talked some more about what we had been doing since we last saw each other (25 or 30 years?) Before I viewed the art at LACMA, Jim gave me a short tour of the La Brea Tar Pits that are next to LACMA. What a strange natural phenomenon! It sits there and bubbles randomly. It can't be built on - it has to stay open. There is a fence around it and at places in the lawn there are safety cones. If you pick up a safety cone you will see a hole of tar that had bubbled up through the lawn. Very mysterious and weird! As a kid, I collected plastic models of animals from the tar pits: a saber-tooth tiger, a mastodon, etc. In my youth I was intrigued by this place that collected extinct animals. As an adult visiting the place, I am even more intrigued.

I did attend the 2019 LA Art Show at the convention center. There was a lot of bad art there. I'm glad I got free tickets to attend. It is one of these large exhibits with galleries from all over the world. Many of the galleries had obviously exhibited art made for selfies or to simply attract attention. There were a handful of good booths, but mostly it was bad art.  I also went to the beach in Santa Monica, near the pier. I watched a sunset. Here is a gouache painting I did of the sunset.

OK, maybe this has been a little too much like a slide show of my family vacation. The last thing I will add is that the day I left Los Angeles it was 71 degrees and I ate my breakfast outside at a restaurant. I arrived in the Twin Cities late that evening and by the next morning it was -29 degrees. That is a swing of one hundred degrees. I miss LA.

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