Art Is Where You Always Return To
After “Number 10, 1949,” by Jackson Pollack

What do you see?
Let the picture pulsate.
Let it work on you. Let it spread out, let it wrap its arms around you. Let it embrace you, filling your peripheral vision so nothing else exists, or has ever existed. Or will ever exist.
Let the picture do the work, but work with it
Meet it halfway.
These pictures deserve compassion.
They live or die in the eye of the sensitive viewer. They quicken only if the empathetic viewer will let them. That is what they cry out for. That is why they were created.

This scene takes place near the opening of the John Logan’s play, Red, between Rothko and his assistant. A short time later the artist asks the young man’s favorite artist, wanting the first person that springs to mind.

The answer immediately given: Pollock.

Rothko’s begrudging reply: It’s always Pollock.

It’s true. It always comes back to Pollock. Think of that happy place your brain takes you to when things get too much or life just won’t let up. For me it’s the MFA in Boston, the Art of Americas wing. Specifically: Number 10, 1949.

And all of the above directives apply when I am standing there. I am close, but not too close, lest an alarm arise or a guard come to admonish. It fills my peripheral vision, becoming for a bit my whole world and the rest falls away. I sink into the spaces between the paint drips; in awe that there is texture, that he included bits of materials like sand and glass. That one could use different types of paint so that the sheen and finish play off each other in sharp contrast. Standing there I feel this connection to the hand that held the can that dropped the paint. I sense the fervor, the energy, the dance of paint that led to this specific creation. The through line from artist to buyer to museum to me.

Art is what calls to you. It’s what occupies your thoughts and allows you to stand there and take it all in, for as long as it takes. Seconds, minutes or hours. Looking with more than your eyes. Giving yourself over to the experience as you quiet your mind and inhabit an image or a melody or the arrangement of carefully chosen words. It’s the place you always want to return to.

What a gift just to stand there and bear witness. The size and orientation of the piece (nineteen feet long and only eighteen inches high) instill in me a need to open my arms wide. It doesn’t embrace me as so much demands that I open myself to it, to give over the hurriedness and tempo of my life and exchange it for a new one. To emulate the back and forth see-sawing of paint covering canvas. A new, hushed rhythm to be matched.

I can see it in my mind’s eye—though it may be overly sentimental—a fond remembrance of an old friend until we’re in company together again. These days comfort comes in all forms. When it arrives, I open the door and usher it in.

—EM Reynolds

EM Reynolds is a librarian/bookseller in Vermont, who likes to discover the tiny extraordinary details of life through a camera lens.Visit her on onesmallsentence.wordpress.com and her latest venture, which focuses on the wonder to be found in picture books, missbethhasabook.wordpress.com.