#19

I can cross #19 off The List.

Saturday, after conquering an obstacle course of metro stations, taking three wrong turns, ascending and descending eternally long escalators (the longest ones in the metro system), dealing with a "stripped" fare card, avoiding drunken football revelers and a swarm of people on the Mall for a march and navigating the diagonal roads of D.C., while lugging a 20-pound messenger bag and my over-sized watercolor portfolio, I spent 30 precious minutes in the Rothko Room at the Phillips Collection.

The Rothko Room is a small room with four walls with a large color field painting by Rothko on each wall. A small (uncomfortable) bench is in the middle of the room.

Rothko's idea in creating this room was to give viewers a chance to view his paintings in a more familiar setting, that is, in a room that is more family-like, literally. The scale of the room was not unlike an average living room. It was far from the spacious, soaring space of most art galleries. The effect is immediate intimacy.

And, it was lovely. I had to move around a lot for my eyes to really see. And sometimes I'd walk out of the room to refresh my eyes before diving back in to see more.

When I was finished looking, my eyes were saturated.

I didn't even try to look at the rest of the collection: my eyes were already full.