Wednesday in Los Angeles: The Getty Villa, Malibu Seafood and El Matador Beach

I have always had an incredible passion for western art, and since my first trip to Italy, I have had an incredible passion for ancient Roman art and architecture. Since that time, I have had the amazing opportunity to work with Dr. Eleonora Del Federico and Dr. Bernhard Blümich

in Herculaneum, Italy where we studied and had access to some of the greatest examples of Roman architecture, wall paintings and mosaics. We had the opportunity to research in the newly excavated Villa dei Papiri which few people are allowed to enter, and we were only allowed to go in two people at a time to prevent any excess change in humidity.

Standing barefoot on the remains of the tiled floors of the patio in Herculaneum, I would wonder how the columns would have stacked up around me to the intricate sculpted and painted ceilings and how luxurious the sculptured gardens would look if I had the opportunity to see them in their prime. The Getty Institute has been doing a significant amount of research in the Villa dei Papiri and has recreated the original site in their Getty Villa museum. I was thrilled at the opportunity to see the Getty's recreation of the villa and to have the opportunity to walk its halls mumbling "I touched the real one."

The halls of the museum are sheltered within a just, if not somewhat enlarged, recreation of a roman villa. The entrance leads to a handsome atrium from which a series of small rooms spider out in every direction. Within these rooms are held glass artifacts, stoneware and beautiful ornaments excavated from the Herculaneum site and other sites of the same time period. After wandering through the maze of rooms, a brightly lit doorway leads you out to a small garden in the center of which is a shallow pool flanked by at least 16 bronze statues. This garden seems like quite the main event, until you walk through to the central garden which boasts an incredibly symmetrical plan with a vast pool and fountain, beautifully sculpted bushes and a variety of fig and pomegranate trees.

It seems the Romans were just as fond of gardens as I am: every entryway leads to another garden. The eastern gallery boasts mosaic structure which serves as a fountain and water source to a small pool filled with water lilies and lotus plants, and the side of the mansion is flanked by a huge herb garden, planted with all of the plants that have been depicted on Roman wall paintings. Thyme and rosemary fill neat, rectangular plots while ripening pomegranate and fig trees contour the plots and provide an incredible shaded walk.

Each piece of statuary and carved scenery in the museum's well rounded collection is an inspiration to any painter, and my particular interest in figural compositions and relief-esque sense of space made the Getty Villa an amazing museum for me to visit. I would recommend it to anyone.

After the museum we drove over to Malibu Seafood, a great place to get fish and chips about 20 feet away from the shoreline. I was introduced to this place a year ago on my first visit to Los Angeles and couldn't wait to go back. We sat on their opened air patio in the sunshine eating fried fish and watching waves crash onto the beach.

We continued on our drive along the coast line and arrived at El Matador beach. The amazing beaches on the Malibu coast are surrounded by cliffs and provide safe heaven from the freeway that stretches along the coast. We parked and made our way to the edge of the cliff and as we followed a curving, dusty pathway down the cliff-side, we were honored by an incredible prospect of the wide open sea and the sculptured rocks it repeatedly crashes into.

El Matador beach is known for its romantic nooks and as we descended to the beach we found no more than 10 couples within eyes' breadth and settled by a private cavern by the famous Matador. We had no neighbors in site save for the albatross, who was incredibly interested in my purse and would saunter across the beach to it any time we were more than 15 feet away from our camp.

For as long as I can remember, I have had an incredible passion for the ocean and romantic caverns by the sea. This beach was perfect. A great stone structure abuts the edge of the beach, the strength of the waves has carved out caverns in the stone and years of dust and debris have given refuge to flowers and succulents that grow atop the rock structure and droop down its sides.

Walking around the rocky shoreline, we discovered a vast display of sea life, biding time until the return of the high tide, a seemingly dangerous lifestyle, but it seems they have been surviving in that manner for years. Giant orange and violet starfish clung to the undersides of rocks and hid covered by disturbed clumps of seaweed. To my amazement, a large population of anemones clustered behind every shady rock. They drooped lifelessly in the low tide, but awakened instantly as the waves ushered water between the crannies of their rocky homes.

The Pacific Ocean is incredibly cold, at least in the summer, as that is the only time I have yet visited the west coast, so most of our meanderings on the beach were in the safety of the warm sand. Only once did I venture past ankle deep in the waves, and had to recuperate for quite a while afterwards.

We walked up and down the shore and amused ourselves with photoshoots and feeling the sand shift under out feet as the waves hit our feet. We would have waited for the sun to set behind the glistening sea had we not been recalled to the present and packed our things to join our friends for dinner.

Los Angeles on Tuesday: Getty Center

We arrived in Burbank, Los Angeles, and after some troubles, rented a red Volkswagen beetle (our excuse is that it was the cheapest car available, but really we thought it was fabulous). We were staying at Rafael’s friends Kit and Christine’s house and we drove over to Christine’s work to meet her for lunch, she works at Dreamworks studios. Turning onto Flower street, we expected a futuristic compound of animators and studios, and in its stead we found a commanding Venetian façade of orange spackling crowded with climbing vines and topped with ceramic tiled roofing. The buildings were all connecting Venetian villas with cypress trees guarding each entryway and flowered hedges silhouetting the sidewalks.

We ate lunch at the cafeteria, which provides free lunch and breakfast everyday, even to us, and took a tour of the buildings and gardens. Dreamworks has built a beautiful brook into their grounds, which leads to a waterfall, that supplies a lake, which in turn runs off to a lagoon stocked in koi and goldfish who hide beneath the shade of water lily pads.

After our tour of Dreamworks, we headed over to the Getty Center in Los Angeles. My first visit there last year was during a private reception for a conference I was part in, but I longed to see the complete art collection and stroll the gardens in the warm afternoon sun.

The Getty Center boasts a truly wonderful prospect. The museum is situated atop a giant hill, and the modern limestone structure contrasts wonderfully with the trees and shrubberies it has surrounded itself with. The museum is comprised of a cylindrical set of buildings surrounding a fountain and limestone courtyard.

A multi-leveled patio overlooks the entirety of Los Angeles, which is so much more extensive than the compact vertical cities I am accustomed with. Clumps of buildings and metropolitan areas are surrounded by romantic hilltops and mountains scattered with palms and eucalyptus trees. From the highest overlook, you are enchanted with a huge succulent tree garden. A grouping of tree aloe plants hedges a stairway to a circular preserve of a wide range of cacti.

Peter Paul Rubens and Jan Bruegel the Elder "Return From War: Mars Disarmed by Venus" 1610

We toured each set of galleries in turn and I was overjoyed to find a substantial collection of Peter Paul Rubens paintings and studies as well as the works of several of his students and contemporaries. One painting in particular caught my attention, Return From War: Mars Disarmed by Venus, because the style of the figures and setting did not seem to belong to the same artist, yet both styles of painting seemed incredibly familiar. I was surprised to learn that Peter Paul Rubens frequently collaborated with Jan Bruegel the Elder who would work on the backgrounds. Rubens and Bruegel are two of my favorite artists of that time and have both had an incredible influence over my work.

Peter Paul Rubens "Miracles St. Francis" 1627 and Peter Paul Rubens "King Ferdinand" 1635

The Getty Museum has an amazing collection of European art ranging from pre-Renaissance works through the Eighteenth Century. The collection is separated by period and nation in the separate buildings surrounding the courtyard. Traversing the galleries in one trip is easily managed by taking breaks to stroll through the courtyard gardens.

Gérard Audran after Charles Le Brun "Crossing of the Granicus"1672

Apart from its permanent collection, the entirety of which I was unable to see on my last visit, the Getty Center had an incredible printmaking show. Printing in the Grand Manner is a collection of large scale prints reproduced from the paintings of Charles le Brun and his studio. In general, I am always very fond of figure drawings for reference, if for nothing else, but these works were quite to my taste. The Grand Manner is a genre very focused on a heroic protagonist of sorts, the imagery surrounding whom, depicts the protagonist overcoming some evil, celebrating a battle or avoiding a vice. The images are incredibly complex and reproduced quite well in catalog format.

One of the main events, at least in my view, is the Alice in Wonderland-like central garden created by Robert Irwin. The garden follows a sloping hill, through which a gushing stream meanders between planted succulents, flowering shrubs and drooping trees. The stream falls off into a waterfall which leads to a calm pool encasing a labyrinth of finely pruned shrubs. Surrounding this pool is a series of walkways and plantings of gorgeous colorful blooms and mint green succulents, leading to mushroom like structures from which roses emerge in full bloom. Every time I visit the garden, it looks completely different, but never does it fail to put me in a reverie.

As the sun began to set, we took the trolley down the Getty mountain to continue our adventures.