Event 1: Getty Museum

Since opening in 1997, the Richard Meier designed Getty center has quickly assumed its place in the Los Angeles landscape as the city’s cultural acropolis and international mecca. The J.Paul Getty Museum at the Getty Center in Los Angeles houses European paintings, drawings, sculpture, illuminated manuscripts, decorative arts, and European and American photographs. 

When I got to the Getty Museum, regardless of the gallery, I personally think there’s nothing more relaxing than spending part of a pretty day just strolling through the central Garden, which itself is actually a copyrighted work of art by Robert Irwin. 

Other than the central park, the gallery of “the poetry of paper” left a deep impression on me. This exhibition of drawings explores the concept of negative space—the unoccupied ground around drawn elements. I see many famous artists such as Rembrandt, Boucher, and Seurat deliberately left areas of the paper blank to create the illusion of light and form. If I could use one sentence to express my feeling after visiting this exhibition, it has to be “using absence to evoke a sense of presence. 

When drawing human figures, artists frequently used negative space to suggest form, trusting the viewers’ imagination to interpret the empty passages. The following painting is my favorite in the gallery. Although there is no chair under the character, the unoccupied ground below a reclining figure can be understood as a chair or couch. Therefore, I saw the character is perfectly stable. 

When creating architecture, artists also utilized negative space to help the view distinguish exteriors and interiors. The following painting is created by Giovanni Battista Piranesi who used red and black chalk to magnify the effect of light streaming into a building or shining on a column.
Personally, in designs for architectural decoration, empty space saved time: there was no need to fill the entire sheet when the intent was to repeat the concept on a ceiling or a wall.