When Amy, Tom, and I went to Washington, D.C., in 1996 as volunteers and panelmakers for the AIDS Quilt exhibit, we also took the opportunity to see a lot of the capital’s sites and visit art museums. I think the first museum we went to on that trip was the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden which we all enjoyed very much. I have a lot of photos from there; here’s one of Amy standing next to Clyfford Still’s 1950-M No.1.
We also went together to the Corcoran Gallery of Art. I saw so many great paintings and sculptures that my head was reeling from it all, but I still couldn’t wait to go to the National Gallery of Art because I knew they had a lot of Mark Rothko’s works. If you are a frequenter of museums, however, you’ve probably had the sad experience I did. Permanent works are often in storage because of temporary installations, or maybe the collections are on loan. My Rothkos were nowhere to be seen.
Amy bought me a few postcards of the works that I should have been seeing, and those are still framed and hanging in my office today. She also secretly bought something in the gift shop to be shipped to her. When it came, she had it framed. And then on Christmas–voila! A gift for me that managed to pull together the love Steve R and I shared for Rothko, my friendship with Amy, and all the experiences of that trip to Washington and our AIDS/HIV awareness and activism. I look at it every single day in my living room.
As for all those other paintings I didn’t get to see on that trip, a few years ago Tom gave me this Rothko retrospective published in 1998 by Jeffrey S. Weiss, John Gage, the National Gallery of Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art. It’s HUGE and has over a hundred illustrations of Rothko’s paintings. Nothing can replace seeing art in person, but this volume’s large reproductions remind me why Mark Rothko’s paintings always offer me new perspectives and nourish my soul.
Rothko’s work is something I’ve always admired, as well, even though his art is probably the work people are MOST likely to compare to the painting their five-year-old made in kindergarten that day. They just don’t get the deliberation and the depth of the brush- and colorwork in each of his paintings.
Yes, and my other favorite, Pollock–they could be sitting next to each other in kindergarten, right?
There’s some art I come to appreciate only after learning more about it. Then there’s art that gets a visceral reaction of LOVE from me and only later do I come to study and understand why that might be. I would happily sit with my paste and crayons and stare at what those two are doing across the room in that kindergarten class!
Guess I’ll have to search out the four Rothko works that SLAM has for you.
Yes, please!
Now if you could just scour your memory for that 60s commercial which features “The Answer Grape,” a cartoonish character–a grape, of course–who was full of facts (yeah, right) about wine.
I have only this from a recent search:
The Answer Grape was an animated “know-it-all” spokesman for a brand of wine, he had a very dignified demeanor and would answer any question. The commercials ran on television in the early 70’s. The questions asked were by the purest of coincidences always about grapes.
Why I’m asking you to scour your memory is because I’ve been searching for a video of the TV commercial featuring “The Answer Grape” and have been unable to locate it.
The Answer Grape is still not on YouTube. I started checking all those years ago: http://beckycochrane.com/2012/09/21/legacy-writing-365265/
Forgive me, but I’m commenting on the wrong page. I meant to comment on the page about wine and grapes and the drinking of wine. Don