Many years ago, I had a college friend who was an evangelizing devotee of the abstract painter Marc Rothko. I remember her gushing over a catalog of Rothko’s work, while I was thinking that I must be aesthetically challenged; I just didn’t \u00ab\u00a0get\u00a0\u00bb it. After all, most of the paintings were nothing but large rectangles of color, with slight irregularities and a contrasting border or stripe. All of the familiar reference points of line and shape, perspective and shadow, were gone.<\/p>\n
I could appreciate them as \u00ab\u00a0design,\u00a0\u00bb but not as \u00ab\u00a0art.\u00a0\u00bb While they were pleasing enough, I couldn’t see why anyone would rhapsodize over these abstractions… until I first saw them for myself in person–a completely different experience! When I encountered them at the Museum of Modern Art, they literally stopped me in my tracks, subverting conscious thought and plunging me immediately into an altered state.<\/p>\n
They were not just flat canvases on a wall, but seemed more like living things, pulsing and throbbing in resonance to a wavelength that had a fundamental connection to the Source of things. I was stunned. They didn’t \u00ab\u00a0express\u00a0\u00bb a feeling–they were more like feelings themselves, and they seemed like nothing personal to me, or Rothko, or anyone. When I later looked at the reproductions Rothko’s works in books, they reverted to flat swatches of color. There was a recollection, but no recreation of my experience. This was an experience that depended on the presence of the original artifact (art: a fact<\/em>).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Many years ago, I had a college friend who was an evangelizing devotee of the abstract painter Marc Rothko. I remember her gushing over a catalog of Rothko’s work, while I was thinking that I must be aesthetically challenged; I just didn’t \u00ab\u00a0get\u00a0\u00bb it. After all, most of the paintings […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"rs_blank_template":"","rs_page_bg_color":"","slide_template_v7":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[40,41],"tags":[43,44,45,16,46,47,48],"class_list":["post-1665","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-elementor-music","category-music-theme","tag-elementor","tag-envato","tag-kentha","tag-music","tag-non-stop-music-player","tag-theme","tag-wordpress"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/djeefsrecords.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1665","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/djeefsrecords.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/djeefsrecords.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/djeefsrecords.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/djeefsrecords.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1665"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/djeefsrecords.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1665\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/djeefsrecords.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1665"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/djeefsrecords.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1665"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/djeefsrecords.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1665"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}