Three pairs,
six painters,
six mirrors.
Image by Tony Mariotti - Los Angeles
A guided, sensory experience at the Norton Simon Museum — six portraits, six different ways to look at yourself.
Norton Simon Museum
Pasadena, California
Duration
About 90 minutes, guided group
Limited spots
Small group
Limited places for a special event
Donation-based — suggested $15–30, collected on-site.
No one turned away for lack of funds.
free museum admission that day
The Idea
Don't think of this as a classic museum tour — it's more of an experience.
We'll start with a short meditation, to help you arrive fully present.
Then I've put together a walk built around six works, six portraits, six visions of reality.
You've probably heard the phrase before — that pressure to "find your truth." My take is that we're all multiple, and that truth shifts depending on who's looking. I wanted to offer a walk that invites you to see yourself in more than one way — not to land on a single truth, but to multiply your points of view, and maybe notice something you'd forgotten or overlooked.
The tour
Three pairs, six painters, across three centuries — each paired with two scents created for this tour.
I Ingres & Goya
1806: the same year — one just starting out, the other a court painter at the height of his career. One pursues perfection, even if it means bending reality; the other, at the peak of his fame, chooses to flatter no one.
Which truth are you willing to pay for — beauty, or accuracy?
II Bellini & Giorgione
The master and the student. Bellini paints merchants and bankers with the same visual language he reserved for his saints — an attempt at painting a kind of spirituality; his student paints the truth of ambiguity, a face dissolving into sensuality.
Are you still looking for a final, definite clarity — or can you accept the part of you that stays in the haze?
III Manet & Morisot
Mentors to each other for fifteen years. A ragpicker painted at the scale of a king — classicism turned against itself — and the fragile sweetness of a summer that won't last.
Is there someone in your life who teaches you to look harder at what's difficult, while you teach them to savor what's gentle?