thoughts thunk

January of this year I visited Los Angeles for the first time. I had been in LAX a few times, but never exited the airport. I grew up in Willamette Valley of Oregon, where one naturally learns to disdain Southern California. I carried my prejudice with me all the way along Interstate 10 from Austin, Texas to L.A., but I was desperate to get out of town during Christmas break from graduate school and couldn’t make the trip home to Portland.

Los Angeles turned out to be a much friendlier and more attractive city than I had imagined. It probably helped significantly that I stayed in the cozy West Hollywood neighborhood (Locally known as WeHo, I think) and didn’t venture far.

Thankfully, I did venture to the Getty. I had no idea what to expect from the Getty, just that it was considered worth going to. I knew a bit about the gardens, since a few years before I attended a lecture by Robert Irwin, the creator.

My day at the Getty was awesome, and I highly recommend going if one is anywhere in the vicinity. The location, the architecture, and the gardens are impressive, perhaps dangerously so, the exhibitions seemed almost secondary attractions.

The big moment for me at the Getty, and the reason I am writing about any of this, was seeing “Christ’s Entry into Brussels” by James Ensor.

I have looked at this painting many times before, printed in books, displayed on monitors. I considered myself familiar with how this painting looks. The most exciting thing about seeing it at the Getty was how wrong I was. The painting is take-up-the-entire-wall-huge and bright; the crowd with its ghoulish and farcical characters seems to spill over the frame. I laughed out loud at the shock and pleasure of the sight and, for a while, I was happier than I had been in a long time.

p.s. Even though I had seen reproductions of Ensor’s painting, I hadn’t read anything about it, making it quite easy to miss discussions of its size. In my opinion, those little dimension notes found at the bottom of most book plates don’t count.