August 12th
What would Rothko like here? Having himself been adopted by New York city, what would being in the Costa Rican rainforest be like? Concrete jungles don't come with wildlife and the wild and hectic of the city isn't the same as the wild and still of each second out here—a stillness without silence since murmuring is the natural state of this forest.
Though the forest speaks more than silence it says less than the honking or the discordant street chatter with people talking past each other in dialogues hailing from all over the world.
But let's not compare his element to this. Instead, let's ponder this for what it is. Observe that, in the midst of the clearing, small patches of low-lying bush grow. Despite this seemingly desolated area (actually a pasture for the landowner's father's cattle), this particular plant survives over the trimmed grass. As our group approaches, someone kicks a leaf onto a small patch of them and, suddenly, the leaves shrivel up, revealing a grayer side, like death, but with thorns, a protective mechanism that ultimately grants life.
Visually, Rothko is not in these plants. I see some of New York in the bird sounds, analogous to honking, but even those aren't the colorfield which pervades and envelopes, at best they're like a Mondrian that pulsates.
As I pass a log, however, I do see a Rothko in miniature. Smaller than his canvas, albeit. I notice a bright orange against a dull, patchy gray brown (as if applied in thin washes that passed over each other like the union of warm and cool water, of the same element but inherently different and only becoming the same with time). What makes a color a color? Is it the ink or is there a commonality that it is a color? Is green more similar to a leaf or red?
But I digress before before having revealed my Rothko. My Rothko appears in a fungus, whose smooth geometry emerges from a scraggly bark, injecting order, quite literally by absorbing the nutrients and energy of the chaotic log it grows from.
The rush of orange is no true rush unfortunately, as the green plants, grass, and foliage of the forest swallows it, swallowing my joy, swallowing my Rothko, yet I have legs so I near it. I bend to see it, and I'm drawn to this so does not this Rothko absorb a bit?
But who is enveloped here, who can be completely within it? I ask myself this half-rhetorically as I watch my answer walking past, carrying a leaf like all its buddies. At the leaf-cutter ant's scale I also spot a Styll. Gnarled, attacked, appreciated then shredded in Bacchic revelry the bark shows the same scene that the scarred canvas in my dear Anderson Museum depicts. Here it too is brightly lit, though from a leaf-diffused sunshine not the artificial glass filtering of modern architecture.
Though smaller, the scale does not matter like in my fungus-Rothko. Style's canvas-flesh is torn just like the bark-canvas here is. The surface is not artificially torn as Styll's paint does which compensates for the reduced sense of scale, since pain is pain, and certainly wounds are only a matter of proportion.
Now, close enough to see the canvas, I smell too the damp. No museum has this. Perhaps glass has a smell of sorts, just like silence has a sound.
As blood pours through your veins, as muscles tighten to loosen, as your lungs disturb the air, the silence is quickly filled but is it filled as much as damp? As this pervasive air-water that pours into you, engulfs your pores, your nostrils, your eyelids? Glass does not house this sensation.
Should I search for Pollocks in the days ahead? With all the wet, perhaps a Helen Frankenthaller—actually I have seen one, as the water which desperately clings to sand reflects the last glimmer of sun before it evaporates. I remarked that it was like a gauze as a friend at my side remembered chromatography—those experiments of middle school years' pasts. I still see a veil, perhaps fitting because it's like a blushing bride—after all are not the moon and sea wed—perhaps fitting solely for aesthetics because as the gauze pulls back, the foam acts like the part of the cloth that folds up over itself and becomes almost opaque through the optical properties of compounded layers of translucence.
August 13th
I found my Pollock today, on the beach within the interaction of tracks, seaweed, and sand, chaotic at first, but each streak belonging to its kind. Each color on one of his canvas is of a particular type of splatter, brushwork, drip patter, after all, so just as we can see the layers on the beach, so too can we find the layers on a true Pollock.
I found my Kline as well in the spider. I guess if the artist is creator, then Pollock is the beach or the currents perhaps since maybe the moon which orchestrates this cosmic dance, exposing sand and wetted creatures, attracting the pipers that dot the beach, and leaving the seaweed to rot, never having loved it anyway.
But how is the agent the artist? And why is the moon Pollock and not Pollock a new moon? Didn't Kline paint bridges which, in its ideal triangular geometry, mimic the strongest construction, overlooked as it is, the web?
These abstract experiments reject representation, and isn't the zoomed in image itself no longer representational? patterns are patterns so what does it matter if the rough, scratched bark has Rothkoesque patches like convergent evolution, nature and the city dweller Rothko converged on the same effect. So what does it mean to be searching for Pollock. Am I vladimir in this scenario, foolish scanning this life-filled but meaning-empty patch of the rainforest? Why do I seek connection to other meaning to begin with? Why am I here?