breathing

The romantics were prompted to seek exotic subjects and to travel to far-off places. They failed to realize that, though the transcendental must involve the strange and unfamiliar, not everything strange and unfamiliar is transcendental ...

With us, the disguise must be complete. The familiar identity of things has to be pulverized in order to destroy the finite associations with which our society increasingly enshrouds every aspect of our environment ... For me the great achievement of the centuries in which the artist accepted the probable and familiar as his subjects were the pictures of the single human figure -- alone in a moment of utter immobility ... I do not believe that there was ever a question of being abstract or representational. It is really a matter of ending this silence and solitude, of breathing and stretching one's arms again.

-- Mark Rothko Possibilities No.1, 1947