I could not believe how much I enjoyed the abstract expressionism exhibition. I attended this exhibit several times before, but it never had a lasting impression on me. I always left the exhibit thinking about what all of these paintings were supposed to mean. However, during this visit I got a little bit of background knowledge from Paula Stuttman, the tour guide, and from a previous tour I had of the exhibit. This information helped me see abstract expressionism in a new way. I spent a few hours walking around the exhibit by myself and realized that these paintings that I once thought of as meaningless, actually had a lot to say.
I enjoyed the paintings by Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman, Ad Reinhardt, and Jackson Pollock the most. One of the texts for a Mark Rothko painting contained the quote “art is an adventure into an unknown world…” I thought that this was the perfect quote to describe the abstract expressionist style and Rothko’s paintings. The first painting that I saw by Rothko was “Slow Swirl at the Edge of the Sea.” As soon as I saw this painting, I did not like it. I could clearly distinguish two forms, but I could not find any personal meaning in the painting. However, once I got to the room full of Rothko’s “multiform” paintings, my first impression of Rothko’s work changed. In these paintings, Rothko experimented with the relationship between space, color, and scale. I could not figure out why I was drawn to these paintings. They looked so simple, just a few colors and boxes. Yet, they made me feel more than the complex and numerous shapes in the first Rothko painting. The painting that really caught my attention was “Slate Blue and Brown on Plum.” When I looked at this painting I felt a rush of emotions. The beauty of the colors and the balance between them was overwhelming. The deep plum color in contrast to the blue made me feel excitement, fear, and calmness all at the same time. As I continued looking at Rothko’s paintings, I read some text that said he began experimenting with darker colors in order to create depth. After this I went back to the plum painting and realized that the plum color did actually create a feeling of depth. The painting did not feel flat, but instead looked like it contained a lot of space within it. I realized that this depth was what made me feel overwhelmed. Rothko’s experiments with color, space, and scale were an artistic adventure into an unknown world. In my opinion, this adventure was successful because it resulted in art which could create emotions with simple colors and forms.
The painting, “Vir Heroicus Sublimus”, overwhelmed me because of its large size and bright red color. However, even though the dominant color of the painting was bright, it was not the most noticeable part of the painting. The aspect of the painting that caught my attention was the white “zip”. Even when I closed my eyes (which I had to do a few times because the painting’s bright color almost made my eyes hurt) I could still see the white zip. Accordring to the text next to the painting, Newman wanted his paintings to be viewed from a close distance instead of far away. As a result, I decided to take a closer look at “Vir Heroicus Sublimus”. I realized that there were some imperfections in the red color. The painting was not perfectly one shade of red. This made me think about life and how sometimes when we look at things from far away or just at their surface, they may seem perfect. However, once we take a closer look and examine them we begin to see problems and imperfections.
