Rothko is one of my favorite artists ever. I saw his work at the art institute when i was a little kid on a field trip with my class. I sat in front of one of his paintings for hours because i was so captivated by it. My teachers got mad at me because i wouldn’t move. That’s the thing about his color fields is they’re just so captivating and they’re big, they kind of take up your entire field of vision so you’re almost forced to look at them.
His process is really interesting too, he doesn’t really paint on the canvas in a sense. He takes his paint and he mixes it with turpentine and it thins the paint out to where he starts to stain the canvas instead of painting on it. With the paint being so thin he can put layers and layers and layers of it on the canvas and it will still look as thin as ever. That thinness helps these huge blocks of color seem to float and be weightless, he also softens the edges of the squares so that helps them float in space as well. But the cool thing about Rothko’s paintings are that since he would put so many layers on if you get really close you can see that theres green, yellow. blue, red, brown, black etc. even though it only looks like there’s a couple of colors on there.
Rothko was a really interesting character he suffered heavily from depression and eventually took his own life. He was influenced a lot by expressionism and surrealism and he abandoned representation in his work because he wanted to focus on the “articulation of interior expression” He was very interested in and influenced by Nietzsche and Greek Mythology.
Rothko wanted to remove all obstacles between the painter, the painting and the viewer. He claimed that his paintings were not self-expressions but “statements about the condition of man.”
His “sectionals” are kind of difficult for people to understand because the style used or the form kind of disagrees with the intent. “Toward the elimination of all obstacles between the painter and the idea, and between the idea and the observer.” What he really wanted was this sort of sublime and transcendental experience that you would get when you looked at one of his paintings. He wanted you to be overcome with emotion.
Anyway he’s an interesting guy to read about and his work is just… i mean you can’t help but just stand and stare for hours. At least i can’t.
The only reason i would ever set foot in Texas:
You know what. I was searching for these images and i came across people that copied his "Style" and i looked at their work and read about it and what not, and it seems like people are just doing it because it looks pretty. And i kind of take a bit of an issue with that. I mean I understand that, yes, things are visually stunning. But everyone seem to be ignoring important underlying ideas. This is specifically relating to the idea of abstraction where there is a lack of representation. People nowadays just seem to be borrowing the aesthetics of the movement without actually knowing or thinking about what that means. Because abstraction was historically a really pointed and political action to remove representation. And right now you know people can say that they're interested in texture or abstracting things or whatever (i wonder why people especially in photography when they go to abstract something they zoom in close?) but there just seems to be a lack of politics behind what they're doing. Especially i think with a lot of photographers working in abstraction. I'm not quite sure how to exactly very well articulate my feelings on this, but its just something thats been bugging me for a while. Anyone have any thoughts?
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