Reverie

In this book from The Tate about the artist Sir Terry Frost, I found this:

"To look at a painting which gives you the opportunity to have solitude, to be yourself and to be able to wander into reverie, is more than hedonistic, it's spiritual".

Until now I have never 'got' the work of Mark Rothko - I loved his way with paint, but never understood the paintings themselves. Somehow this quote managed to pin down for me their essentially meditative nature.

Which leads me to this from Rothko:

"Art to me is an anecdote of the spirit, and the only means of making concrete the purpose of its varied quickness and stillness. "

In a strange way this has also given me a focus for my own abstract work, where I have I think always had this guilty feeling that I was simply making patterns - which for me is decoration not art. Consequently I am preparing a series based on this idea of reverie and on the idea of looking into and through a painting and finding yourself as much as the artist. Time will tell...