A.M. Homes: The story of me and Mark Rothko is that when I was a kid, my father who's a painter used to go every weekend and look at art in Washington. And I would go with him, and I would sit in museums all over Washington,looking at art for hours and hours and hours, and having this accidental art education, where I would just stare at the painting sitting on benches waiting for him. And in the end it turned out it was really incredibly marvelous. And I discovered Mark Rothko among many other artists. And I think it's in large part how I became who I became. And I think for me, looking at the Mark Rothko paintings was, for lack of a better description, the first time I saw myself in art. I also think it's an incredibly compressed field which always amazes me, that he is able to take everything from horror and ecstasy and pure, sheer rage and the most sublime, delicate, wonderful experience and boil it all down and render it as indivisible. Each element is there and you can't even begin to break apart which ones which.I think that he achieves in his paintings what I'm trying to achieve in fiction, which is that expression of the things that go unseen and unsaid and unarticulated. And I'd never seen anything—color, gesture, texture—represent an emotional experience so fully. So that meant an incredible amount to me.
Yup. What she said.
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