Blessed Are The Abstract Poem by gershon hepner

Interplay between the canvas and the pigment
is greater than the one between the viewer and
the painting when he can’t abstract the figment
of imagination hard to understand
by those who’re used to seeing images that speak
directly to the dilettante who is their viewer.
Blessed are the abstract, since they only seek
iconoclastic wood, not worship of the hewer.

Inspired by an article on Mark Rothko in the TLS on October 24,2008 by Julian North (‘The journey north: An exhibition of Mark Rothko’s late works reveal paintings at odds with his fame as a colourist––and his own rhetoric’) :

Grouped around Tate Modern’s Room Three, the massed ranks of these muzzy upright frames, two-barred or three-barred, come together as a solemn, hieratic monument that will mutely absorb almost any description that spectators propose for it, much as an ancient stone circle might. I would characterize the emotional palette as running from snarling oranges to haunted mauves (via many a queasy, equivocal half-tone) . You might differ on the particular adjectives: but I expect we would agree that the range of feelings these paintings induce us to enter involve much foreboding and some anger. That being accepted, what remains intriguing is the sheer immediate persuasiveness with which the pictures effect the induction. Rothko’s peculiar magic as a painter was that his bear’s paws could weave gossamer: blunt though his brush often seems, he was exquisite at opening up and variegating the interplay between pigment, binder and canvas. For the benefit of the curious, the Tate exhibition provides technical analyses of his repertory of tricks for holding colours in suspension. (They apparently involved great quantities of eggs.) And those take us back to the recollections of Dan Rice.

10/25/08