I have sat in front of Rothko for a very long time. The National Gallery and the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C., and the Rothko Chapel in Houston are three places that you might find me doing this. It takes about fifteen minutes before we can feel settled to truly see something. Most of the time, we are trained not to see, but to categorize and move on. It’s our basic survival mode. But if you allow yourself to simply sit and stare, the eye can open up to take in beauty in a way that is rarely experienced in life. Rothko painted in layers, and each layer, it seems, comes alive to our
...more
