maravilla

maravilla
Originally uploaded by suttonhoo.

The Getty wasn't around when I lived here last (sure the Villa was, but not the new hilltop masterpiece by the architect Richard Meier), so it was of course the thing I was most bratty about, bugging my stepmom to pay it a short visit even though the doors closed at 6 and it was after 2 when we got there, my laptop having crashed on me en route and more or less insisting that I take a little PTO time since I had accomplished almost everything (*almost* everything) that I'm capable of accomplishing on my handheld from the time that my plane touched down until she was able to pull herself away from work.

And the next part of this story is: WOW. Holy frickin' WOW. What a place. And it's all about place.

The exhibits that we caught -- a brief and tidy handful -- were more than worth the price of admission (which was free, outside the $8 fee to park): A commissioned work by Bill Viola (I'm a fan, so I'll take what I can get of Viola, even though this piece -- Emergence -- is low on my list of stuff of his that I like); some lovely illuminated manuscript leaves (yes, of course, pilfered -- sometime many hundreds of
years back before they finally arrived here. this is the Getty after all.); and the smattering of Impressionists were nice (highly recommended by the matronly museum guard, so we felt obliged).

The knock your socks off portion resided in the photography wing and included a show featuring the whole spectrum of the work of André Kertész -- including the still life from Mondrian's home and a whole series that he executed on postcard stock -- in itself enough to make me giddy happy, but then I was pushed beyond the tolerance of all that is seemly by a showing of Graciela Iturbide's work.

Holy Sh*t.

She undid me.

But it was the Getty itself, of course, that outshined all that -- the alternating rough and finished travertine surfaces, the extraordinary gardens orchestrated by Robert Irwin; the quiet spaces and grand pavilions and jawdropping vistas that make you want to linger and learn and luxuriate.

What a stunner of a place.

And then there was dinner and too much salmon (so good. so right on the coast.) and too much chocolate and catching up with my stepmom, who raised me and whom I haven't seen in *forever*, about heartbreaks and expectations and finding your feet again.

All good.

And now to bed.

Tomorrow we work.

I photographed real life -- not the way it was but the way I felt it. This is the most important thing: not analyzing, but feeling.

—André Kertész