Notes on the artist's reality.

Kind of picking up where I left off last year. I'd got a copy of Mark Rothko's The Artists Reality, and done my usual close reading technique of rewriting most of the book onto sheets of scrap paper folded into quarters. Which G. thinks is mad. Possibly I should just write all over the book itself when I'm studying. But I rarely can actually take a pencil into a book. I just can't.

I was lassoed by this book's title. I've been interested in the relationship of the drawing as a representation, to the experience of the subject through the senses as another representation. My expectations were a little too specific for this text, and as Christopher Rothko points out in the introduction, this is not a finished polished text. It has been published postumously, with minimal editing, from a draft manuscript that Rothko might or might not have finished himself and attempted to publish. He had certainly stuck it in a drawer for twenty years without doing so. I'm not sure we can know precisely how this manuscript functioned for its writer. It was written early on in Rothko's career, before his development of the abstract squares which are so strongly associated with him. It was written when he had spleen to vent; artistically frustrated, and in an unhappy marriage with a more successful designer.

I found it to be romantic in its perception of other artistic ages, and bitter in its description of applied, common, or popular art. I had hoped for discussion about abstraction and its edges, although with hindsight, this was not the text to look for it in. I wonder if there are edges. If all representation isn't in some way an abstraction from what it is possible to experience.