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On the third floor of Manning’s Coffee Shop in the Farmer’s Market in Seattle confronting the Sound, the windows are opaque with fog. Sitting here in the long deserted room, I feel suspended enveloped by a white silence. Two floors below, the farmers are bending over their long rows of fruit and vegetables; washing and arranging their produce under intense lights shaded by circular green shades. Above, where I sit, the world seems obliterated from all save memory; abstracted without the feeling of being divorced from one’s roots. My eye keeps focusing upon the opaque windows (an equivalent of the picture plane). Suddenly the vision is disturbed by the shape of a gull floating silently across the width of the window ( a line of movement drawn across the picture surface. Then space again. In opposing lines to the gull’s flight, the Sound moves northward through the Inland Passage.. .. It is true that trains run daily out of Seattle to points East and South, but my mind takes but little cognisance of this fact. To me Seattle seems pocketed. There is only one way out: Alaska, toward the North! Swerving to the South, there is the Orient, although in San Francisco I feel the Orient rolling in with its tides. My imagination, it would seem, has its own geography.
--
Reminiscence and Reverie, Mark Tobey, Magazine of Art, 44, October 1951, pp. 228, 229; as quoted in Abstract Expressionist Painting in America, W.C, Seitz, Cambridge Massachusetts, 1983, pp. 45, 46

 

Mark Tobey

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