Andrea senza errori, he was also called. What that means is that he never made a single mistake, when he was drawing.

Naturally I had to look that up too, whenever it was that I memorized it.

It saddens me to also happen to know that how Andrea died was during a plague, poor and neglected.

Although Titian died during a plague, as well. If in his case at the age of ninety-nine.

Jackson Pollock crashed his car into a tree, no more than ten minutes away in the pickup truck from where I am sitting right at this moment, on August eleventh, 1956.

I forget Pollock’s birthday, on the other hand. Although doubtless it is not something I ever knew.

I had also forgotten Renoir’s arthritis.

My own left shoulder has not troubled me at all lately, however.

Gauguin was one more painter who had syphilis.

Even if, had he lived during the Renaissance, he would have had to belong to the guild of pharmacists.

All painters did. This was because they compounded pigments.

David Markson, Wittgenstein’s Mistress

In an old Paris Transatlantic interview, Clifford Allen asks Joe Giardullo about the influence of Pollock’s paintings on his music, particularly the “illusion of three dimensions” of which Giardullo points to Rothko as a further example.

“You stand in front of a Rothko,” Giardullo explains, “and it starts to change when you look at it. What seemed to be one thing becomes another because there are subtle shapes, and there’s so much paint and so many layers. It exposes itself to you slowly.”

“And yet you condition yourself to certain optical responses within paintings,” Allen points out, “you come to the painting with a certain type of response that you’re expecting to get, a certain type of effect that your mind and body are aware of and primed for.”

And Giardullo puts it beautifully:

The situation I want to create in the listener is one where they are not conditioned. I think a lot of the music that I was getting frustrated by did not seem serious – I heard it and came away underwhelmed. It may have been well-formed, but it played to those expectations and made it easy for the listener to say, oh yeah I’m comfortable here, or, I’m uncomfortable there. I think that’s doing a disservice to the listener – when expectations are clear and met, you have a success at a certain level, but at a great cost to the music. What we have to do is present people with an opportunity to be involved, give them a place to enter, whether it’s rhythm or it’s melody, whatever it is. Bring a certain mystery to it – not too much because people will abandon you, but a certain amount. Lacy’s a great example – I don’t think anybody knew what the hell he was doing, no matter whether they recognized the music or not. He never made people comfortable, but he always made them listen.