The museum is wonderful, intimate and easy to navigate in a couple of hours. The most memorable corner of the galleries was the small room where four of Mark Rothko’s large canvas multiforms hang in close proximity “overwhelming the walls?, and a single bench in the center anchors the viewer. I sat down, breathed in, and spent a good five minutes gazing at each canvas in turn.
Strange and wonderful emotions arose in me as the colors drew me in. The shadow below the frame became part of the soft edges of canvas, included in my field of vision. By the time I turned to view the third canvas, Green and Maroon, things became really interesting.
Rather than looking at the painting I looked into the painting.
The maroon shade of the lower third of the piece began to flux. Paler and deeper areas revealing luminous patterns of inner light changed the longer and more profoundly I held my gaze. The upper section repaid extended observation by morphing from a swirl of dust that into turbulent cloud then eddying currents of deep water.
All this movement came as an utter surprise, an unbidden reward given by the pause in time I spent with Rothko’s masterpiece. In the space between these two elements – between the green and the maroon – there hung a distant horizon, a thundercloud over desert floor, or a glimpse of planet-fall from the window of some interstellar spacecraft. Then, with a sudden surprise I returned to the upper segment and found the smallest pinprick of white sitting in the green, like the evening star. The second I noticed it, it appeared to move across and around, a drifting point on a fluid background. My experience of the painting became utterly subjective, profoundly meditative, surreal and beyond the comprehension of the logical mind.
Read the rest here.
More on Green and Maroon here.
From Simon Schama's BBC series, Power of Art ...
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