GUTSHOTWOLFDOG

Content warning: contains an image of a painting depicting artistic nudity and self-harm

Here I am finishing off my California trip blogging a month and a half later… just in time for me to go on another trip next week. See, I totally spaced them out on purpose so I’d keep having things to post about periodically, and not because I like to procrastinate. It’s aaall premeditated…

I’ll refrain from making authoritative statements on the quality of the galleries or the work on display or anything like that because I’m a simple uncultured cur and have visited perhaps five art museums in my life. I took a huge number of pictures of art for studies and reference (or just to metaphysically steal if I liked them), but it feels a waste of time and upload space to dump them here when you can go look at nicer digitizations on the Getty’s own website. I’ll share a few favorites anyway:

Author’s note: this is how I look at you if I like you

I was surprised how many different artists had depicted Lucretia. This piece by Artemisia Gentileschi (CW for descriptions of sexual assault) was definitely the standout, both in the piece itself and the artist’s personal connection to the subject. I highly recommend reading about her life and works if you’re interested.

This was probably my absolute favorite of the pieces we saw; I’d really like to work toward colors and contrast like this in my own works. All the public domain scans of this piece are much darker and less saturated, which is strange because it seemed to me that my photo above was pretty true-to-life. The fun fact with this one is that the castle was originally called Brillenburg, but after several centuries spent pouring money into its repairs, it became known as Castle Kostverloren instead – basically “Castle Money Pit.”

It being a rainy day when we went, and the Getty Museum being on top of a mountain, everything was foggy and damp (no complaints here, that’s my favorite kind of weather). We didn’t stay long, but we were able to get through a few of the gallery buildings and the gardens. The number of art pictures I took was rivaled only by the number of plant pictures.