and cotter come no more

any pronouns are fine

[cosmonautroger]

Louise Bourgeois, Maman, 1999

[dailyrothko]

Mark Rothko Untitled (Harvard Mural sketch), 1962 oil, acrylic and mixed media on canvas Gift of The Mark Rothko Foundation, Inc. 175.6 x 142.6 cm (69 1/8 x 56 1/8 in.) framed: 181 x 148.3 x 7 cm (71 1/4 x 58 3/8 x 2 3/4 in.) Accession Number 1986.43.149 Copyright © 1998 Kate Rothko Prizel and Christopher Rothko

As most of you know, the murals that Mark Rothko did for Harvard in the early 60s were irreparably damaged and have only been seen restored through the ingenious use of light projection. However, some of the paintings that were not on display, the studies, sketches and alternates, did not meet the same fate. One of the best of these is being shown in Florence right now.

This painting has always been wild to me. I have never seen it in person, but it looks very spontaneous. It has a similar urgency to Rothko's last painting in 1970 in terms of how obvious the brush expression is.

By contrast, when you see the alternates for the Seagram Murals, you really can't tell just by appearance which ones were meant to be final, but to me painting really does look like a sketch. It lacks a certain amount of depth in terms of the layering and the brushwork is quite furious and exposed in a more obvious way we don't usually see with Rothko. Usually that asymmetrical busy painting is further underneath the surface of his pictures. Rothko, likes to hide it like he does with his edges.

And unignorable here is how incredibly bright these colors are, as if he wished to make the picture boldly primitive in every way and really smack you in the face. It's also quite a departure from the religious totems of the finished murals which Rothko had once mused would represent Christ resurrection on Easter morning.

I'm not sure I've seen a blue that's as bright as this ever from Rothko. It's almost the electric in certain light. For a painter with so many recessive tendencies in his layers, this feels almost like it's not dry yet.

(While many versions of this are in the archives, this scan seems to have disappeared, so here it is again with my thoughts)

[polkadotmotmot]

Annieo Klaas - Golden Honey Evening, 2023 - Oil on Canvas

[havingapoemwithyou]

Nocturne by Frank O’Hara

[binturong-of-the-day]

The binturong of pride

[dailyrothko]

Mark Rothko, Untitled, (Blue, Orange, Red), 1961 oil on canvas, 90 ¼ × 81 1⁄16 in. (229.3 × 205.9 cm), Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.   © 1998 Kate Rothko Prizel & Christopher Rothko/Artists Rights Society (ARS)

[time-thy-pyramids]

I dreamed last night I was reciting a poem of my own authorship to a friend, and they were guessing who wrote it. It was only eight lines, in two stanzas, and I experienced it very clearly word-by-word -- as opposed to having the gestalt impression of reciting poetry, without more fine-grained experience -- but the only detail I can recall is some imagery related to elephants.

[time-thy-pyramids]

Hardest photo ever taken...?

[binturong-of-the-day]

The binturong of watermelon

[teathattast]

[afroesoteric]

Me

[composersdoingnormalshit]

Igor Stravinsky having another creepy breakfast.

[mark-gently]

How does one move past the feeling that microtonal music sounds "out of tune"?

[time-thy-pyramids]

Start by listening to Bach in reconstructed tunings to develop an appreciation that "out of tune" is a construct that requires constant maintenance by the equal temperament hegemon. Then you can proceed to the more adventurous just intonation material -- La Monte Young, maybe Terry Riley -- to get accustomed to music that emphasizes the unusual intervals more heavily. Finally, you can dip your toe into the properly microtonal stuff: Kyle Gann's Hyperchromatica is good for casual listening; Ives also has some interesting pieces.

[binturong-of-the-day]

The binturong of agreeableness

[cuties-in-codices]

bird marginalia

from the bible of borso d'este, illuminated by taddeo crivelli and others in ferrara (italy), 1455-61

source: Modena, Biblioteca Estense, MS.V.G.12 (= Lat. 422)

[time-thy-pyramids]

Outline of a theory with no explanatory power about why I find some art to be good and some art to be bad, based on visiting the outsider art museum and the "real" contemporary art museum in quick succession:

I tend to interpret art by trying to understand it as an act of expression. This and what follows apply just as well to art construed broadly but I will talk here about visual art. Sometimes the expression is very straightforward; Georgia O'Keefe painted the flowers up close because she wanted people to pay as much attention to them as they did to the skyscrapers that were beginning to dominate urban life. Sometimes it is harder to describe; his eyesight failing, cloistered from the broader art world in his Giverny studio, Monet painted again and again the same cluster of water lilies. These iconoclastic visions that the artist needed to get out of their mind and into the substance of the world are the ones that I am most drawn to. On the other hand, a large amount of contemporary museum art doesn't seem to express anything so much as the desire for money, status, or (more charitably) the performance of what a serious artist does. There is a certain irony here because the interpretation of these pieces is invariably exclusively about what they are apparently meant to express, of course usually related to the artist's identity; but the execution of these pieces does not seem to spring spontaneously from this expression.

[dawatcher]

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