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Posts Tagged ‘art’
Trompe l’oeil on a Hollywood Garage Door
Another Odd Sight on a Los Angeles Guided Tour
Our private Hollywood tour passes by some odd sights from time to time. While we have grown to expect this our luxury tour guests are always pleasantly surprised. For example, this garage door suggests all the great books inspiring screenwriters here in town. Or maybe not. And there is so much more throughout Hollywood, Beverly Hills and Bel Air. From great outdoor art to humorous mailboxes the sightseeing in Los Angeles is always a special treat for our guests as well as our tour guides. We wonder if Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar is shelved here so we can read about the soothsayer’s warning, “Beware the Ides of March,” after all, it’s today!
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A Bit of Rome in Los Angeles – Getty Villa
A Great Aerial Photo from our Los Angeles Tour
Approaching Malibu along the shoreline we look down from our helicopter to see the incredible structure that is the Getty Villa. This museum houses the Getty antiquities collection consisting of more than 44,000 statues and artifacts from ancient Rome, Greece and Etruria (whence Etruscan). From this vantage point our private Los Angeles tour guests can see the grounds, gardens and amphitheater of this fine art destination where they can later go to enjoy several guided tours. The museum opened in 2006 and provides a perfect complement to the J. Paul Getty Museum looming high above the villa in the Santa Monica Mountains (though readily accessible from the 405 Freeway). If you are a devotee of glass art you will want to visit the Getty Villa to see the Oppenländer collection of ancient glass now on exhibit. Our 3-hour ground tour (part of a combination Los Angeles helicopter and ground tour) can take you back past the Getty Villa on a drive up the Pacific Coast Highway to Malibu.
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Los Angeles Luxury Hotel Lobby Art
Our Private Los Angeles Tour Begins in the Lobby by the Art
Our company motto is “On time is late!” We always arrive early to our rendezvous with our private Los Angeles tour guests at their luxury hotels in Hollywood, Beverly Hills, Santa Monica, downtown Los Angeles and anywhere they happen to be staying. What do we do when we are early? We pull out our cameras and photograph the art in the hotels. The Jason Young installation seen above captures your attention when you stand in the lobby of the supremely elegant Beverly Wilshire Hotel, one of our most frequent custom Los Angeles tour starting points. Jason, a Paris and Los Angeles trained artist, originally from Canada, now resides in New York but his artwork is on display throughout the world. Describing his projects as high-tech minimal “trompe-l’oeuil” is certainly one way to characterize the colored acrylic panels that adorn the Beverly Wilshire’s lobby. We are more likely to say, “Wow, that’s amazing!” We’ll post more luxury hotel lobby art in the future.
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Marilyn Monroe Discovered in Palm Springs
The winter months always attract visitors from the north and east to our local desert community in Palm Springs, California. Mild weather to us Californians means light jackets and socks, to those from winter climes we’re talking shorts and t-shirts, bathing suits and golf togs.
A special treat for everyone this year is a wonderful giant sculpture of Marilyn Monroe in her famous pose captured in the film The Seven Year Itch. This 26′ tall, 17-ton Seward Johnson
(of Johnson & Johnson) work is a lifelike homage to a queen of the silver screen. She stands in the center of town drawing admirers, gawkers and some very strange people to meander all around her, framed by clear blue skies and the nearby mountains.
T
he sculpture was erected last May and is not a permanent resident of the neighborhood — at least not yet. There is some controversy surrounding the highly sexualized yet iconic image (and fascination with the lacy panties, a photograph we are withholding to avoid the controversy ourselves). Yet, Marilyn Monroe was discovered at the local raquet club and sat for Bruno Bernard, famous pin-up photographer, and met Hollywood talent agent Johnny Hyde there. She apparently always loved this beautiful desert village.
Palm Springs is less than 2-hours drive from our fair city so a private Los Angeles tour out to the desert is reasonable. We can also fly by helicopter or private jet and spend more of a day trip seeing the desert and noting all the Hollywood history attached to this town.
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New Murals in West Hollywood
On the side of the parking structure overlooking a xeriscaped garden and urban park and playground is this fun and colorful Kenny Scharf mural. The parking structure serves the park and community center in West Hollywood and is right across the street from the Pacific Design Center. The xeriscaped garden is actually the roof of the parking structure for the West Hollywood Public Library. This public art on a grand scale greatly enhances the park and library experience. The easy parking with lots to see and do makes this one of our Los Angeles destinations during many of our private luxury tours — especially when we have kids on board. Bathrooms, running around space, a playground, lots of other kids, it can be a perfect place to admire the newly reconstructed park and the new library along with the beautiful Pacific Design Center buildings right across the street. There are always lots of photo opportunities for us, too.
Just around the corner is another grand mural, this one by Shepard Fairey that maintains his OBEY theme. With so many nice days during the year in southern California outdoor public art richly fills the urban environments throughout Los Angeles and its constituent communities (Hollywood, Beverly Hills, Santa Monica, and the beach towns like Venice and Malibu).
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The Los Angeles Art Scene for Christmas
Downtown Los Angeles has a vibrant art scene with its many galleries and studios. Art lovers also find their way to Beverly Hills for very upscale works, to La Brea for more exploratory pieces and to Santa Monica and Malibu for their art destinations. In fact, there are as many art neighborhoods as theater neighborhoods around Los Angeles which over the decades has become a magnet for creative people in all fields of expression. Kikki Eder‘s piece above is a real Los Angeles location on York Street in Highland Park, a neighborhood known for its artists and its Mexican restaurants. Kikki’s work is on display right now in a holiday exhibit at East Los Angeles’ ChimMaya Gallery. Buying art, especially local artwork, is a wonderful way to celebrate the holidays. We are requested several times a year to provide private luxury tours to art galleries and studios around Los Angeles, tours we love to do. From great museums to “art in the park” affairs, we pay attention to current exhibitions and trends so we can customize tours to fit our guests’ interests. Sometimes the sightseeing is not just Hollywood and movie history and the celebrities are not actors and directors.
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The Berlin Wall Becomes a Part of a Helicopter Tour
One of the best ways to enjoy a private sightseeing tour of Los Angeles is to see it from the air — in a helicopter. And the most exciting part of a helicopter tour is the rooftop take-off and landing from a downtown skyscraper! We regularly make this arrangement for our private luxury tour guests who request it, like the Bastow family from Perth, Australia.
What makes this tour worth noting is that while returning to their hotel from the rooftop helipad in our vehicle their guide, Paul, just happened to mention that Los Angeles was home to one of the largest displays of actual intact Berlin Wall segments in the world. The Bastow’s tour was not our combination 60-minute helicopter charter plus a 3-hour ground tour but when they appeared interested in seeing the Berlin Wall exhibit we were happy to make a little detour to spend time at the wall and capture some photographs.
All of our tours are custom and we go out of our way to make sure our guests see what they want to see even when it adds a little bit of time to our schedule.
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Business Art in Downtown Los Angeles
They said I had a head for business
They said to get ahead I had to lose my head
They said be concrete and I became concrete
They said, go, my son, multiply, divide, conquer
I did my best
- Philip Levine -
This is a sculpture you cannot miss as you walk down Figueroa Street in downtown Los Angeles. The absurd position and headless anatomy captures your attention immediately and brings to mind ostriches and corporate drones. It is even more humorous if you see someone stopped at Terry Allen‘s sculpture assuming a similar position to read the poem embedded at the foot of the statue. However, upon reading the poem yourself the seriousness of the message emerges and a more thoughtful tone surrounds this wonderful piece of public art. Guests on our private luxury tours of Los Angeles appreciate the opportunity we give them to see and closely examine the art on display in the open around Los Angeles, Hollywood and Beverly Hills. The Los Angeles area has considerable public art exhibits — permanent, temporary and even guerilla — and great pride in these works.
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Teena Marie, Venice R&B Artist Remembered
Venice, California is the bohemian capital of Los Angeles and possesses dramatic murals throughout the neighborhood. One of the most recent additions is this Teena Marie mural. We took this photo during a private luxury tour while showing our guests the local seaside communities. Besides Venice we visited Marina del Rey, Santa Monica and Malibu. Click the photo above to enjoy a short video about Teena Marie.
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Levitated Mass Is One Heck of a Big Rock
Michael Heizer’s 340-ton rock is now in place and ready to be enjoyed in the backyard of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA). The name of this fascinating installation is Levitated Mass. We took these photos on a private luxury tour of Los Angeles with an emphasis on public art. Conceived by Heizer decades ago it took much of that time just to find the right rock which eventually turned up in a quarry in Riverside, CA, 105 miles away from LACMA. The rest of the the effort was in designing a special vehicle to transport the rock all those miles along city streets.
Heizer specializes in a form of expression called Land Art and he, in particular, creates work of immense proportion. This will surely be clearly seen in Google’s satellite photos.
So now the big rock is here and provides another great Los Angeles high-”gawk” factor sight as well as shade for kids on a hot summer day.
