Villa Montalvo

This week was our second week of spring break. My son and I decided to spend the morning at one of the most beautiful places in Saratoga called Villa Montalvo. We have been coming here since he was pretty young. This is a great place to explore and it doesn't cost a thing. It is a very inspiring place for artists young and old. We started off down a sloped path to find a sculpture in a beautiful shade of turquoise by a small waterfall. My son seemed to have the right color Sharpie so he wanted to sit on a bench in the shade and sketch it with me. While we drew we wrote down the sounds that we could hear nearby: waterfalls, the breeze, birds, construction and cars.

After we did our sketching we walked around the serene grounds. My son ran around on the big grass field a bit and then we headed down to the rose garden area. When you walk into the gates of the garden you can immediately smell the fragrance of the roses. We explored a bit and found some new things such as a succulent garden with a neat sculpture that we both agreed looked like a guitar. We sat on some neat benches made from logs to relax a bit. 

After we checked out the gardens we went over to the art gallery where they had a neat exhibit of sketches and paintings from an artist named James Gouldthorpe. The exhibit is called "A Painting in Ten Chapters".  The museum website describes Goldthorpe's work: In his expansive new installation, Particles: A Painting in Ten Chapters, James Gouldthorpe explores the passage of time and the aggregation of the self over a lifetime. The artist projects forward into the future and reaches back into the past, mixing humor with melancholy as he explores birth, childhood, adolescence, middle and old age, and death, and reflects on both the poignant and absurd nature of existence. The neatest part of the exhibit was an old typewriter. My son enjoyed using one for the first time. It is hard to believe the last time I used one of these was in college, the electric kind. I had to refresh myself on how to use it. 

Following Villa Montalvo we went to one of my son's favorite places for lunch in downtown Los Gatos called Andalé. He loves to eat on their back patio. He says that "it is a nice and relaxing place". While you are back there you feel like you are on vacation with the beautiful tiles, palm trees and the trickling fountain. He always orders their burrito and I order their shrimp quesadilla. They also have really good traditional Margarita's. This has been come our go to place when we are in Los Gatos together. What a nice ending to such a magnificent day!