Day 3:

Stand and stare.  Last year in DC, I rushed up the narrow steps of the National Gallery tower to see my beloved Matisse cutouts, only to discover that they had been replaced by six giant black canvasses.  Stark white walls.  Giant black canvasses. You can't get much further away from the exuberance of Matisse's larger-than-life scissored scenes than Mark Rothko. But on giving it a chance, I discovered that inside the subtle blackness of the art was a surprisingly transformational experience.

Today I understand why.  A lifetime of Rothko paintings are being shown at the Portland Art Museum including some of his signature "rectangle" works.  What completed the picture for me is the comparison of these masterworks with his equally intriguing, but turmoil-laden earlier abstracts.  When juxtaposed, you can practically feel him come to a place of total confidence and clarity of purpose that give these paintings a dramatic finality. They are no longer about thinking, but only about feeling.  It's as though he simply had to create them and in doing so, they became his world. And if you stand and stare and let the painting become your world too, it does have the power to transform you. Remarkable.

As amazing as that was, the most stunning and strangely disturbing experience of the day was a John Frame exhibit.  (You'll have to google him.)  His current life work is creating these intricately designed miniature sculptures and scenes of otherworldly semi-human creatures that he's fashioning into a stop-motion animated film.  Devastatingly inventive, there is something absolutely elemental about his creations that becomes both thrilling and frightening at the same time.  It almost feels as if you're bearing witness to an obsession and self-revelation gone too far. Yet at the same time, it's as though the multitude of tiny glassy eyes are revealing the depths your own soul. Scary.

I'm not sure if any of this says more about the artists or more about myself.  I guess that's what makes art so surprising, enchanting and mystifying. I hope I'm not haunted by the rabbit man in my dreams tonight.