#modernart

Walking through the Museum of Modern Art last Tuesday, I found myself stopped cold by Kandinsky's

Composition VII

. Not because I understood it—I didn't, not at first—but because the painting

Standing in front of Rothko's "Orange, Red, Yellow," I felt something break open inside me—not in a violent way, but like watching ice melt in spring. Three massive fields of color, bleeding into each other at their edges, and somehow they contain every sunset I've ever witnessed and every feeling I've never been able to name. This painting doesn't ask you to understand it. It asks you to

feel

it, to stand there long enough that your analytical mind gives up and something deeper takes over.