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Nancy Bauer

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Recently, I watched Simon Shama's lecture on Mark Rothko for the second time. The artists that Shama chose for his DVD series, The Power of Art, are a gloomy bunch. Madness, suicide, murder and war all figure prominently. Among the other eight artists in the series is one of Rothko's gods, Turner, one of the superstars at the Beaverbrook Art Gallery.

Shama describes how he first came to view Rothko paintings. He didn't intend to see them, didn't want to, but he took a wrong turn in the Tate Modern Gallery and found himself standing in front of the Seagram series. It was love at first sight.

I have seen only one Rothko, in the Walker Art Center 20 years ago, but alas I can hardly recall it. I've found some of his paintings on the internet to put on my desktop, not as good as seeing the originals, but I do see them up close on my 17-inch monitor. Even there they pulse with light. Shama says the paintings "throb." The one that's on my computer now is Red on Maroon, a column of red between two columns of maroon, and on the edge, two columns of black. It's uncanny how the red glows as if it's backlit, and yet the maroon and black don't. Shama says about this painting, "I felt pulled through those black lines into some mysterious place in the universe."

Asked how far to stand from his paintings, Rothko said, "eighteen inches," exactly the distance between my eyes and the computer. I like to bend over paintings until my nose is just a few inches away from them. Rothko has now given me permission. I went down to Gallery 78 to try this on original works because no matter how good reproductions are, you can't see the actual paint, the reality of it. I wanted to be aware of the actual brush strokes made by a human hand.

The main exhibit at the gallery, The Year at Afton Lake, oils by Monica Macdonald, was perfect for this 18-inch experiment. Monica lived in Fredericton for a long time, but a year ago, when her husband retired, they moved back to their home province, Prince Edward Island. The exhibit is a hymn of joy to coming home. I could always recognize a Macdonald painting, but now, having looked at them so close up, I would know one if I could see only a few square inches. Her palette is quite distinct: a primary yellow dominates, with orange, orange/red, dark blue, green, especially lime green, with dashes of mauve or lavender. From the distance at which you ordinarily observe a painting, they are landscapes: lake, ocean shore, birch wood, winding red dirt roads, sowed fields. But at 18 inches, I saw distinct patterns of brush strokes with patches of paint so thick it was almost as if she had put them on with her thumb. I was in communion with her hand. Why did this hand put in these dashes of purple among the trees? Why the mauve horizon?

I went upstairs in the gallery to further my experiment, using oils by the two Stephens, May and Scott. In St. John backwater, May has applied the paint so thickly that in places the work becomes three dimensional; the gobbets pointed at me. Scott in Small Falls also uses the technique of impasto. Most of the painting is dark, with browns and murky greens, so that the swirling white of the falls jumped out at me. At 18 inches, I saw enigmatic dots of red and blue.

I visited David McKay in his studio in the gallery and looked at a watercolor in progress, Chimney Rock. McKay is no slash-and-burn impasto artist, but you still see the brushstrokes that render the unusual rock formation. "I love to paint rocks," he says. Tiny dots create the forest floor. David and I had adjoining studios for 20 years. I know well the expensive tiny brushes that make these dots.

Rothko said, "It is a risky and unfeeling act to send your pictures out into the world. But art lives by companionship and dies by the same cause." I felt this risk when my kids left home. I felt the same way about my novels; I feared their publication. I didn't believe, however, that criticism of the novels was directed at me personally but at what I had given birth to. Peering at the paintings in Gallery 78 from 18 inches gave me the same complex sensation of companionship that I experience with a mother when I am holding her baby. Rothko wondered if art could "cut through the white noise of ordinary life and connect us with what makes us human: ecstasy, anger, grief." At Gallery 78, I connected with joy.

Nancy Bauer is an arts columnist who lives in Fredericton. She can be reached at wbauer@nbnet.nb.ca.