Ways of Seeing

A winter’s day in DC. While I slept snow came shawling out of the ground…drifted out of the arms and hands and bodies of the trees; snow grew overnight on the roofs of the houses like a pure and grandfather moss, minutely-ivied the walls. (A Child’s Christmas in Wales, Dylan Thomas).

A brisk, crunchy, half-mile walk up the road, past Dupont Circle, I dropped into Teaism to breakfast on a pot of Assam and scrambled tofu. One tea shop and a hundred coffee bars in the capital of a nation that declared its Independence by a consumer revolt against the far leaves - will they ever, ever let us forget?

Around the corner to The Phillips Collection, America’s first museum of modern art, opened in 1921. Housed in the elegant home of Duncan Phillips (1886–1966), the collection includes Renoir’s masterpiece Luncheon of the Boating Party, along with other outstanding Impressionist paintings by van Gogh, Manet, Berthe Morisot, Degas and Cézanne.

The museum is wonderful, intimate and easy to navigate in a couple of hours. The most memorable corner of the galleries was the small room where four of Mark Rothko’s large canvas multiforms hang in close proximity “overwhelming the walls”, and a single bench in the center anchors the viewer. I sat down, breathed in, and spent a good five minutes gazing at each canvas in turn.

Strange and wonderful emotions arose in me as the colors drew me in. The shadow below the frame became part of the soft edges of canvas, included in my field of vision. By the time I turned to view the third canvas, Green and Maroon, things became really interesting.

Rather than looking at the painting I looked into the painting.

The maroon shade of the lower third of the piece began to flux. Paler and deeper areas revealing luminous patterns of inner light changed the longer and more profoundly I held my gaze. The upper section repaid extended observation by morphing from a swirl of dust that into turbulent cloud then eddying currents of deep water.

All this movement came as an utter surprise, an unbidden reward given by the pause in time I spent with Rothko’s masterpiece. In the space between these two elements – between the green and the maroon - there hung a distant horizon, a thundercloud over desert floor, or a glimpse of planet-fall from the window of some interstellar spacecraft. Then, with a sudden surprise I returned to the upper segment and found the smallest pinprick of white sitting in the green, like the evening star. The second I noticed it, it appeared to move across and around, a drifting point on a fluid background. My experience of the painting became utterly subjective, profoundly meditative, surreal and beyond the comprehension of the logical mind.

You won’t get any of this from the representation on the web page above, or the poster on sale in the museum shop. The scale of the original created the experience. Size mattered. The power of the sunset that overwhelms us on the shoreline is lost when we share a snapshot of the same with others. Reality bites.

Executive Communications Lesson

Artists like Rothko communicate non-verbally.

However, I believe astute professional speakers can learn from the response people have to great Art.

Remember that the audience is looking at you as well as listening to you.

Use words to paint pictures.

Be aware of the soft edges of your presentation.

Suggest, play with tone and vary the intensity of your message.

Shades of meaning and the open space around the big issues invite participation. Draw them in. Show, don’t tell.

Paint big; then bring it up close and personal. Overwhelm the walls - have your voice fill the halls.

Give the audience time to discover the hidden depth in your message.

Try this one on for size: use Green and Maroon as the outline of your next speech. Here’s how. Fill the majority of the talk with two main arguments which you lay on in thick, varied, contrasting colors. Then leave a thin space between to excite their imagination. Examples of a transitional area between bold statements that might work for your speaker:

• Night becomes Day with the beauty of Dawn; let us awaken to this new opportunity
• Good arises from Evil at the moment we make the Right Choice; that decision must be made
• The Sky meets the Ground at a Distant Horizon; will you take the journey there with me?