the one where she looked around art galleries

Do the things you love…

Since it has been such a stressful couple of weeks, both in my personal life and at work… I decided to set out to LA and take advantage of LACMA‘s Free Day. I haven’t had the chance to be alone with my thoughts lately… and it was a conscious choice on my part. These past few months my brain has betrayed me more than once… whenever given the chance to itself it hurls itself back to the events last January — a sad rewind that never fails to make me fall back several steps in my grief journey.

But while looking at postmodernism, expressionism, and abstract… my mind tells to defy its usually tricks, and the art becomes a welcome distraction. As I walked through the different galleries it struck me as how much story was behind each piece. From Picasso’s portraits that abstract the human face almost into a mask, to Matisse’s colorfully vibrant fluidity that grabs, tackles. I looked at a Warhol and realized that maybe life is just one long sustained performance art… how we cope with the struggles thrown at us begins with a choice.

The next day was another contemporary art adventure at the Hammer Museum near Beverly Hills. The art here was strikingly strange, unapologetic — from Oliver Payne and Keiichi Tanaami’s sexually bold juxtaposition of line art and video game iconology to Marisa Merz’s The Sky Is A Great Space that fleets between the familiar and the alien. The most beautifully mesmerizing was Aaron Taylor Kuffman’s Gamelatron Sanctuary… both soothing in its dulcet tones and fascinating in its robotic finesse.

On my commute going home from LACMA, there was a very angry man sitting a couple of seats from me on the train. He was spewing out expletives, upset at the fact that he is going to miss the connecting train he was supposed to go to at Union Station. As our moving train comes into a halt at the platform, he brushes past other passengers… still hurling f-bombs…

It made me think about how we all have a choice in how we wants to live our life… there is always sadness, pain, and loss. But choosing to be angry and spreading negativity onto the world?

That’s just not me.

While looking for my TAP card, I was standing at that gorgeous architectural archway (pictured above) when a couple of ladies called me out — “Hey, if you hand me your phone… we can take a photo of you. Your lovely dress just goes so perfectly with the art deco…” I politely declined, then smiled… it was my choice at that moment to take that compliment as something that made me happy. Such a little, random kindness.

That’s who I want to be.