496--If I titled posts like I do my paintings, this one would be called...

If I titled posts like my paintings, this one would be called (using, as you would expect, my standard titling format of a couple of words, then a couple more words in parentheses--often with a wry or humorous slant--and then an alpha-numeric designation):

"If you think I'm fucked up, wait til you hear about this guy (the abyss, in spades) I"

This guy, I should tell you, is Mark Rothko--perpetrator, in my as well as many others' opinion, of some of the most beautiful paintings in the history of the world (If that's not too inflammatory a term. I am, by the way, talking about "perpetrator" not "beautiful.").

This would, of course, be two particularly tasty ones:





Brief aside: I'd be wowing you with my own shit, but Rich has my camera.

Anyway, I'm reading a book by April Kingsley called "The Turning Point"--a book best described as half biography/half art history which chronicles proceedings in the art world in 1950; the only time at which what she considers to be the twelve most important Abstract Expressionists all lived in New York City at the same time, and the year in which each had one of his (or her) most important shows.

So she's talking about Rothko, who survived some portion of the Holocaust before coming to the US. She recounts him recounting the following rationale for his paintings:

... he didn't know whether he had witnessed the pogroms firsthand or whether he had just heard tales of them as a child, but that he had the image of the mass graves Jews had to dig for their own bodies in Russia during the pogroms, and that he thought maybe he had been painting those gaping rectangles all his life.

To which I would suggest a couple of things:

1--Stop giving me shit about tapping into my dark side. Apparently this is how one goes about these things.
2--That boy should try eating a few snakes whole. I think he'd like my abyss a lot more then the one he's got his head wrapped around.

The moral--one of them at least; my thinking is that give me half an hour and I'll come up with twelve or so--is that beauty springs from the most amazing places.

Remind me to tell you about my nascent stripper series.