What I Did Thursday Morning

I spent most of this past Thursday morning at the Getty Center, which is a really nice arts complex in the hills just south of the Sepulveda Pass, just north of UCLA (I think it's in Bel Air, but I have to admit that the boundaries of the various communities surrounding Los Angeles seem rather indeterminate to me). Here's a brief video I shot panning across the main garden, which gives you an idea of how nice the weather was as well as a sense of the neat architectural layout of the Center. The buildings in the background house the various galleries-- each one with paintings and decorative arts from a different era of history, with a heavy emphasis on Europe (there is some Asian art there too, but somewhat surprisingly, no American art).



There were a bunch of school groups visiting that morning too, and so the galleries were filled with kids who seemed to be working from checklists provided by their teachers. So I heard a lot of conversations along the lines of "Is that a landscape?" "No, that's a still life." I also saw a couple of kids standing in front of certain pictures practically mesmerized, which was pretty cool; I just wished they had outnumbered the ones more interested in checking items off their list.