You frantically look for that perfection: a music note placed at exactly the right moment, with just the right pause, the kind that brings you to tears and leaves you wondering what this feeling is, and who could ever make you feel it.
Some people find it in music. Many find it, unexpectedly, in front of a Mark Rothko.
The painter of almost nothing
From a distance, a Rothko is just a few soft rectangles of color floating on a larger field. Up close, it becomes something else. The edges blur and breathe, the colors seem lit from behind, and the canvas fills your whole field of vision. Rothko wanted his large paintings seen up close, so that you'd be inside them rather than in front of them. He disliked hearing his work called decorative. He hoped people would feel something basic and human in front of it, and many visitors have said they cried.
John Logan's play Red imagines Rothko in his New York studio around 1958, working on a series of murals commissioned for the Four Seasons restaurant in the Seagram Building, with a young assistant who challenges him. In real life, Rothko eventually withdrew from the commission. Later, his work found its most famous home in the Rothko Chapel in Houston: a quiet room of dark canvases, made for sitting, not for passing through.
A five-minute color meditation
You don't need a museum for this. An image of a Rothko on a screen will do, or simply a single color: a wall, a scarf, the sky.
1. Choose your color. Let your eyes pick it. Don't wonder whether it's "calming". Choose the one you're drawn to today. 2. Soften your gaze. Look at the center of the color and let the edges of your vision blur, as if you were looking through it rather than at it. 3. Breathe the color in. On each inhale, imagine it filling your chest. On each exhale, let it spread to your shoulders, your hands, your jaw. 4. Notice the edges. After a minute, let your attention drift to where the color meets something else. Is the edge sharp or soft? Does it seem to move? 5. Name what it gives you. Warmth, weight, quiet, courage. One word. Then come back to the room slowly.
Why color works when thoughts won't stop
A racing mind loves words. It answers them, argues with them, builds on them. Color gives it nothing to argue with. No story to follow, no task to complete, just a sensation to rest in. That's why a few minutes with a single color can slow you down when a breathing app can't.
More art to sit with
If you'd like more moments like this, the Digital subscription brings art, music and slow culture into your month: recommendations on opera, ballet, books and places, at least one video each month, practices to try, and the digital edition of "(meditating) On Art". A quiet corner of the internet, made for looking slowly.
Remember to take as much time as you need, and meet me at the next one.
Love, Evi