I’m on a new-ish schedule at work, in which Tuesday and Wednesday are my Saturday and Sunday. So yesterday I spent a few hours at the LA County Museum of Art. It’s the first time in about a year or so that I’d been there. There’s currently a great, albeit small, exhibit of Gustav Klimt’s original paintings, which were more inspiring than I was expecting, for some reason. The landscapes were my favorites – he had a very technically free and yet compositionally controlled painting style, with less regard for light and perspective than for surface and pattern; and yet he pulls it off without seeming mannered, or self-conscious or overly clever. All the paintings had a great sense of honesty to them. I guess I’d never really seen a Klimt up close, and I suppose I had been selling him short. This exhibit really was a pleasant surprise.

The Japanese Pavilion is a strange building – and my usual favorite part of the museum. I sketched it above. Inside all the art is lighted by natural light diffused through shoji screen like windows. You follow a gradual, serpentine path down through the building, criss-crossing an indoor stream that follows a similar path. It’s great. Very relaxing.