Like other similar venues across our nation, the world-famous J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles was closed to visitors because of COVID-19. So its staff decided to engage the public with an actual “Life Imitates Art” challenge. And the results were pretty amazing!
There were so many creative and wonderful ones it was hard to choose. Some of them were quite abstract, so I limited myself to ones that a non-arts aficionado could enjoy.
But even that left me with over 40 selections. So I decided to group them in very broad themes. There will be some overlap as one submission could qualify for more than one theme.
Let’s start with Animals. Proving yet again that cats are free-spirit critters (and confirming the old adage that they cannot be herded) there wasn’t one employing a kitty cat. A ferret – YES, but no cat.
One popular painting was “Girl with a Pearl Earring” by Johannes Vermeer. But I decided to go with “Male with a Pearl Earring”.
I was a bit surprised that Frida Kahlo self-portraits was such a popular subject. I thought these were the two best.
There were a few of the “Ugly Duchess” by Quentin Matsys which were quite well done. (One wonders if the subject knew the title of the painting they were portraying – although the two I picked were both males.)
Far away the most common theme simply involved people. Because there were so many, I made three GIFs; but I didn’t do a very good job dividing them up.
There were a couple cute Rockwell ones.
And I thought we should end with a selection memorializing what generated this “Life Imitates Art” challenge – the Coronavirus Quarantine. So the last one features artworks employing Toilet Paper and Masks.
I’m not sure if all those submitted are at the above Tweet – but there are quite a lot more there for your viewing pleasure.
[EDITOR’S NOTE: I always select “Do NOT Stack Frames” – but have never been successful in getting it applied. So I apologize that there are remnants of previous ones that annoyingly hang around.]
