The Sublime

In my teaching I would frequently use this description of making perfume as a metaphor for reductive painting—as in the work of Mark Rothko, for example. Rothko’s paintings, I would tell the students, embrace the space and spirit of the world, its vastness and its tragedy. He would reduce and compress that immensity, essentialize it, the essence of life until that magnitude was reduced to two trembling rectangles—the Sublime. Vera Klement