Oct 11 2009
LllllllACMA


I drool. It’s a visual treat just being LACMA, and today I felt like I had the place to myself. I mean it was deserted. Never again will I second guess going on a weekend. I was afraid to park my lone car on the street. Where was everyone today?



The Meléndez show (no photos allowed) was amazing, the paintings sparkling and plump. I found myself viewing everything from 8-10 feet away to enjoy each whole picture at once. There was so much to look at, but actually very few surprises up close. I expected to see unusual colors, optical blends, visual tricks… but everything was perfect, traditionally blended, and smooth smooth smooth. There were a few spots where the pottery showed small raised blobs of clay, which any other painter would have mimicked with raised globs of paint. Meléndez painted these so smoothly that I had to walk back and forth across the painting, searching for the point where the paint came off the canvas. Not a ripple for days.
There were a few visual anomalies that could have found a home in a Dali painting: a smart, plump sweet pea almost bouncing off the ground, and garlic cloves too graceful to be real. A funny mix of hyper- and surrealism cut these bits off from the rest and gave them a quality all their own.
My real show stopper for the day, though, was turning a few corners from the end of the exhibit and finding myself face to face with the Lansdowne Artemis, a marble I had seen before but which just punched me in the stomach today. I was alone with this for ages, looking and looking and looking from every angle. My picture doesn’t nearly do it justice. Maybe I can sneak in a tripod next trip!

I finally collected myself and decided to move on, and then I turned the corner to see this–

Another Lansdowne, Athena of Velletri. In person, she was not as striking as Artemis, but she had the hands down lighting advantage. There she sat, basking in afternoon sun. The whole gallery came to life.











