Sunday 1 May 2011

Rothko: Mind over Matter

Looking back, I feel that I have been a little rude. My interests from an art history point of view embody everything; well I have yet to find something that isn’t fascinating at least initially. But my influences in my art work are, to be honest, allot more selfish and contained. Although I am currently pulled back to the same faces and brushes, I want to expand this. (I promise to also begin – and hopefully back tract – to reference all the works I mention here as I have found out nothing is more annoying than when you connect to something and don’t know the adequate context to talk about it)
So you’re very much in media res in my artist discovery.
Tonight I have really taken a dive into the deep end. Over the past few years my ideas have dramatically taken a new shape. I’m someone who through naively disregarded most modern art is now becoming deeply connected to it. Which brings me to Rothko...
Rothko; mind over matter



I was shown this painting and at first I thought that it was some sort of cheat, but tonight I sit here and see so much more. Rothko loved his masters, but unlike them he was not interested in creating an image that could be looked at and understood. He wanted to make a comment on absolute humanity. What makes us human? It is our ability to translate an image? Or is it our emotion? Rothko came from a background before the heyday of modern art and chose to even reject massive commissions because they didn’t fit his personal mission. He believed that art was more than just a media it was a quest of heroism; one that paralleled the Greek and Roman hero’s he loved to read about, but that fundamentally art could change the world.



He chose colours that spoke to our mortality; blood reds and purples that symbolised our own frailty. He stated that, those who broke down in tears in front of his paintings had experienced a glimpse of his journey to the outcome. Indeed it was known that he was suffering depression; his later suicide almost seemingly devalued him to that of a mere failed American abstract artist driven to that extreme.
He was asked how long one of his paintings took to create and he replied a lifetime. His journey to these monstrosities of paintings had taken him through masters and impressionism, through the influences of Dada and Cubism.
Although through this pessimism there resides something remarkably optimistic. That although the gloom in his paintings are claustrophobic that the fear is deal-able. You may turn away from these paintings and still feel their looming presence yet you have the ability to walk away which inspires a sort of confidence in the viewer.



The colours in his early work are not representative but merely sing in their own right. The complex layering creates vivid movements and the spark of life. However towards the latter part of his career the phases of his depression are evident. His first marriage had failed and his daughter had abandoned him, his alcoholism and chain smoking left him with heart conditions and his second marriage was beginning to fall apart. His paintings became increasingly blocked. The black abyss here at the Houston Chapel is completely void of that earlier optimism. There is no movement and therefore the life is completely drained from it. It feels like a cold lifeless slab waiting to have someone’s nails scratched down its rough surface to create that screech, causing the shuddering ripples of discomfort.
Although it may seem that this entry if incredibly pessimistic I beg that it is not seen that way. Rothko saw himself as the modern master trying to speak to the here and now. His paintings may seem pessimistic today but imagine them juxtaposed to pop art. He used every ounce of his humanity to paint for something he believed in and this feeling of a greater purpose and winder concept to his work had really made me think about my own work. Why do I paint? It is a question I will have to get back to you about
And so on that cliff-hanger I bid you goodnight!

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