Suggested audio companion piece: A color-infused Meditation with Dora Kamau (MoMA)
LA is somewhere I don’t dare to return to often simply because I love it too much. Its splendid light and warmth and colors and flavors hold too much personal nostalgia, so every reunion is always too fleeting - which makes the inevitable goodbye and return to the east coast all the more bittersweet.
Yet sometimes I cave in - what is one to do when craving thick ricotta toast and pesto rice from Sqirl amidst snowy January in New York? La La Land beckons.
I returned to LA for MLK weekend.
This trip was an unexpected chromatic re-awakening: I didn’t know my photoreceptors have long lain dormant in Northeastern winter’s grey monochrome until striking colors bombarded them at every turn in LA. It felt like suddenly realizing in the middle of a symphony that I’ve been living in silence all along. A delightful sensory revival!
“Color provokes a psychic vibration,” proclaimed Abstract painting pioneer Wassily Kandinsky. Throughout my weekend stay, I collected swatches of evocative color that best captured my feeling of LA - consider these my love notes to the city of angels.
The Palette
bougainvillea
a redolent pink/ hilltop flowers, porto’s guava jam
Feels like:
- Balmy mornings hiking up the hills behind the house, past bougainvillea vines blushing over mission revival red clay tiles. Stopping to smell the flowers, reveling in their redolent pink.
- The first bite into a Refugiado from Porto’s - the flaky puff pastry still warm, oozing with sweet pink guava jam and cheese - a delicate balance
cactus & lime
a refreshing chartreuse/ garden bliss, electric citrus
Feels like:
- Lounging in the garden, breathing in the sea of green brimming with life: figs, kumquats, limes, palms…every leaf and every blade of grass vivacious, and the glorious cactus coated in golden sheen under the late afternoon sun - a most pristine chartreuse!
- The thrill of a late night run to Tacos Los Palomos - a craving for al pastor is best-satisfied curbside in front of a Walgreens. Squeeze of fresh lime and cilantro on top to cut through the grease. Simply electric.
strawberry lobster
a lustrous brick red/ still life at lacma, santa barbara spiny lobster
Feels like:
- A languorous afternoon lingering in LACMA, engrossed in narrative luxury of 17th century Dutch still lifes. Lustrous brick red is the color of the hour, from the strawberries in Adriaen Coorte’s Strawberries in a Chinese Porcelain Bowl to the lobster in Abraham van Beveren’s Banquet Still Life. Each scene a moment of intimate attention, ephemeral life captured in stillness, the red abundance suspended in immensity of time - memento mori.
- A homemade feast of fresh-caught santa barbara spiny lobster, steamed with fresh scallion and garlic over glass noodles
paint horse in wine
a full-bodied, mysterious umber/ zinfandel, coffee
Feels like:
- Watching American Paint Horses at the ranch next door, the gorgeous pinto spotting of brown and white on their coats like warm espresso swirling in milk
- Dessert upstairs in the hidden wine cellar, after a slow, intimate dinner at Maude on Beverly. Lights are seductively dim. Sink gradually into the upholstered armchair, nice and cozy under the blankets. A sweet creme made with Musquee de Provence squash pairs well with dark 2018 Dashe Late Harvest Zinfandel. Dry Creek Valley grapes. Remember our last time in Sonoma, how happy we were? French press coffee to finish off the night.
malibu sky
a dreamy, dusty blue/ memories by the Pacific
Feels like:
- An impromptu drive through the Santa Monica mountains and the PCH, racing against time to catch sunset in Malibu
- Having the beach to all to ourselves - the dusty baby blue sky hanging above the Getty Villa like a dream, the Pacific before us. The waves crash and fold and recede, metamorphosing blue into orange into pink, washing over each memory anew. Is the return flight to New York tomorrow? We forget - for now, we are here, right now, in this perfect moment
“What memory does is art - it does exactly what art does, to take the world within us and somehow make it ours, through description, through the act of saying the world, saying how we see.”
— Mark Doty, Still Life With Oysters and Lemon: On Objects and Intimacy
I could not bring the warmth back out east to the snow, but I carried my colorful palette of LA love notes home.
How does one make a good feeling last? I poured my palette onto raw canvas - the bougainvillea, chartreuse, lobster, wine, and malibu sky flowing and melding into one another, staining the fabric as my feelings for LA suspended in time.
Here is my very own piece of LA to keep me warm - until next time.