Stay With Me on This.

Alright. Time for me to talk. I'll be the first to admit.. I'm not a fan of all contemporary art. But, I'll also be the first to admit that I dodn't understand it either, and that's probably why. Through my History of Contemporary Art Class, I'm learning about all of these painters of the High Modernist era using techniques like gesture painting and color field painting etc. and why they do it and about their lives and such and it's really giving me some perspective. For instance, Mark Rothko was a painter from the 40s-60s (in America) who did a lot of color field painting (pretty self-explanitory-- large fields of color) and at first I wasn't too convinced. However, once I learned about him and what a spiritual person he was, I started to understand that his paintings were there for the viewer to experience a calm, or an emptying of the mind like meditation and influences of Buddhism (most of his paintings were HUGE so they encompassed most of your vision). Then as his career progressed, his paintings got darker and simpler. Many people attribute this to the increasing depression in his life (he was born a Jew and learned of all his family that had just been murdered in the Holocaust which was just ending; his wife divorced him; a parent passed away). He eventually committed suicide because he couldn't handle all of his grief. Now that I know this, I feel what he felt when I look at his paintings. I don't know whether you took the time to read this or not, but please keep this in mind the next time you're staring at a piece of art work and the stupid lady next to you says "my kid could do that."