Family Drawing Hour at the Getty Center

One of the things I absolutely love about living in one of the largest cities in the world is that there are world class attractions within easy driving distance. It’s strange, because in some ways I feel like we’ve been treating the two years plus that we’ve lived in LA as this extended vacation, where weekends are comprised of day trips where we explore something new and amazing. I love this aspect of our life out here.

It’s especially great when all four of us can agree on a place that we love visiting. We all love biking along the beach in Santa Monica. We all love Disneyland. We all love Lake Arrowhead. And watching a Disney premiere at El Capitan. And visiting the Santa Monica Pier, and Malibu Creek State Park.

But then there are places that we’re split over. Lyric and I love hiking Temescal, but Ollie and Darby aren’t always so eager. Ollie and I love a good museum or zoo, while Lyric and Darby aren’t so sure most days.

And until today, the Getty Center was a place that only I seemed enthused about visiting. I adore it. It’s a showcase of architecture, and once you exit the automated tram (driverless) and reach the top of the mountain, it feels like you’re entering a city on a different planet. I love the gardens, the view of LA below, the waterfalls and waterways. The Monets, Manets, Degas’ and Cezzanes… I’m always eager to get back there, which is met with uniform “what else can we do”?

But today, with Darby otherwise occupied, I made an executive decision. Lyric, Ollie and I were going. I told them they couldn’t complain because I was taking them to Disneyland tomorrow. They were good sports about it.

The Getty has a pretty fun family section, where we got to build our own replica of a sculpture.

And Lyric and Ollie always have fun climbing on the stone wall. One time we played duck duck goose on this yard, and two children looked like they wanted to play too. I encouraged Lyric and Ollie to invite them to play. These kids accepted, and proceeded to only choose each other, meaning that now they were playing duck duck goose and we were just kind of sitting in a circle watching them. It was a bit of a bummer actually.

But then the completely amazing, unexpected joy of the day revealed itself. We were handed a schedule and a “Family Drawing Hour” was listed. Curious, I signed up. Lyric thought it would be boring. Ollie thought we’d be drawing a bug, like we did on one of his field trips, so he was excited. We gathered at the appointed time, and it started out pretty boring. But then the magic started. We were all given our own palette and thick paper and taken to see specific paintings. We sat in front of the paintings, and were encouraged by three excellent artists to improvise off of what we saw. They gave us all fancy new colored pencils. Lyric and Ollie were really into it – it’s such a joy to see your kids completely invested in creativity.

Ollie especially impressed me just because – while Lyric often draws for long periods of time during the week – I was sure Ollie would lose focus. He didn’t.

The first painting we studied is below. We were encouraged to pay attention to how the artist took a fairly plan portrait and then really pushed it past the bounds of convention with the colors and styles in the rest of the painting. They then told us to similarly improvise based off of what we were seeing.

Here’s my take. I really had a lot of fun drawing it. It’s been so long since I’ve really just taken lots of time to draw, and it felt really good and inspiring.

Here’s Lyric’s. She really took the encouragement to play around with colors and take it in a new direction to heart, and I think she demonstrates a lot of creativity here.

And here’s Ollie’s. I love that he’s not bound to trying to be “realistic.” There’s a real Picasso quality to what he drew. And it was so cool because he spent the entire 20 allotted minutes perfecting his piece.

Here’s the second painting we studied. It’s a Cezanne. For this piece, they let us use watercolor pencils – a brand new 10 pack. And we got to keep them. I suppose I should make it clear here that this was free, as is admission. You just pay for parking. Unbelievable.

Here’s my take. I didn’t even notice that I zoomed in on the face, yet it was the most striking aspect of the image for me, so it makes sense that I did. I love the sadness, the weariness that the original painting captures.

Here’s Lyric’s. She has a really cool style going on. When the docent commented that it’s obvious Lyric draws a lot, Lyric said, “Yes I do spend a lot of time on it.” And when I asked why Lyric had her woman looking wistfully to the sky, she explained that that’s the way she likes to draw all eyes, because it looks cheerful and cute.

And Ollie’s is really impressive to me because it’s obvious he’s not simply drawing what he thinks a woman should look like – head, body, arms, legs… but he’s drawing what he sees when he looks at the painting.

So, should you be in the area on a Saturday, check if there is a Family Drawing Hour. As the hour came to a close, Lyric and Ollie wanted to find more things to draw – it was a very inspirational event for all three of us. Highly recommended, and an excellent memory.