So today I went to the Getty Museum. It was an hour drive, but it’s nice to have gone there and be able to know what it is like now. Of course, if it were up to my mom, I would have never gone. Why? Because my family will not drive an hour to and then an hour back to go to a museum. Haha. But my aunt’s family would. [Yeah, that sounds kind of odd, “aunt’s family,”] For my cousin Helen it was her third time, cousin David second time, aunt second time, and uncle first time. I guess my school is cutting back on its budget (ha, what a surprise.) and they’d never pay for a trip to a museum an hour away. The museum itself is free to go into though. You have to pay for parking, but we had a one-time pass for today.

We saw many paintings, sculptures, a garden, furniture (various pieces of furniture from older time periods, and modeled rooms), a weird solar powered instrument, old books written in latin with drawings of medieval beasts, and a giftshop. haha.

Since it’s located up in the hills, you have to park below and take a tram ride up to the museum.

I would say the garden is my favorite. It’s really beautiful and peaceful. It’s actually pretty small, but it’s so nicely designed with a wonderful variety of flowers and plants and flowing water.

Second favorite was the building of furniture and and models of rooms. It’s fun imagining what it would have been like to live as a person of royalty back then. There was this bed with a canopy…loved it! As a little girl I always loved canopy beds and I probably would have died if I saw this bed. By the way, I never had a canopy bed though, haha.

We ate in a cafe around noon. As usual, I couldn’t finish my food (I eat slow and my stomach has it’s limits). But anyway, there is an emphasis on cafe! It was like a school cafeteria (without the horrible food of course). You go around, get your food, and then you pay.

Generally, I discovered that I don’t enjoy paintings that much. I mean, I do like going to galleries and looking at paintings, but I’m by no means excited or in true bliss as some people are. I noticed that I like looking at other things (3D things you can touch…but of course can’t really touch or else they escort you out :P) better. And I especially love nature.

So at the gift shop I decided to buy a poster called Jeanne Kefer. It was originally $15 but I guess most of the posters were on sale ($5).

“Fernand Khnopff depicted the daughter of a composer friend on a porch before a closed door, with her tiny thumb catching the edge of her bow as she reaches into her coat. With this small gesture, Khnopff captured the child’s vulnerability and uncertainty in facing the outside world. To further evoke a child’s perception of a world scaled for grown-ups, he framed Jeanne Kéfer’s tiny body against the adult-sized door and tilted the floor ever so slightly.

Jeanne is further isolated by the free, abstract brushwork in the reflective door window behind her. Typical for Khnopff, Jeanne is not warm and inviting but cut off in the shallow background, a fixed haunting gaze on her face.

Khnopff became a popular society portrait painter in the 1880s, using elements that served him well as an avant-garde Symbolist painter: visual realism and a mood of silence, isolation, and reverie. He frequently posed his models leaning against a closed door, flattening the space and resulting in a meditative, hermetically sealed image.”

I liked it because the bit about the drawing interested me… how Khnopff painted it to make the girl seem like she was a small helpless thing in a giant adult world. That’s how I feel a lot of the time :)