December 20, 2023

Mark and the Moon
American Prairie, Montana
2023

I read an article in the Washington Post recently titled “This once-in-a-generation Rothko exhibition is spellbinding“. I was amused, perhaps a bit bemused even, reading the author’s gushing enthusiasm for Rothko’s color field paintings. Myself, I find them certainly eye-catching (which they are to some degree simply because they tend to be huge), very colorful (of course), and perhaps surprisingly (to me anyway), pretty memorable given their somewhat excessive simplicity. If you ask me to quickly name one notable exhibit room at the National Gallery of Art in D.C., the Rothko room in the east building would immediately come to mind. They are not at all my favorite works at the National Gallery, but some of the most memorable nonetheless.  So, it is not surprising that, even though he would never have put something so literal as a moon in his paintings, he came immediately to mind just now when I was going through my photos from our trip to American Prairie last month and came to this sunset photo. If you also saw this photo and immediately thought of Rothko (perhaps after making note of the image title but without reading all this description), then you know what I’m talking about when I say his paintings are memorable if nothing else.

Triggers
American Prairie, Montana
2023

Nothing particularly special about this sunset photo. In fact it’s quite mundane–except that it triggered some memories for me (as photos, smells, sounds, etc. often do). In particular the colors and the trees reminded me of a photo I still have tucked away somewhere of a very similar sunset view looking up the hill to the west from the front porch of my grandparent’s house on their farm outside of Lyndon, Kansas many years ago. That blurry old photo in and of itself is even less special than this one, except to me, because whenever I happen to come across it, it reminds me of all the good family times and adventures that were spent at that farm decades ago.