ARTWORK(painting) Rothko

Acrylic paint, Oil paint and bitchmen on board

This painting was an exploration into the use of bitchmen as paint and into Mark Rothko's abstract painting technique and conceptual intentions.

”Art to me is an anecdote of the spirit,” Rothko said. 

 He loved the abstract for its lack of representation and urged his audience to seek clarity and personal spirituality by projecting their own internal ideas onto his canvas. He revered the ”elimination of all obstacles between the painter and the idea and between the idea and the observer.”

Mark ROTHKO

Latvia 1903 – United States of America 1970

1957 # 20 [Black,brown on maroon' or 'Deep red and black' are alternative titles']

1957

Mark Rothko’s paintings are fields of colour. He reduced his palette in this instance to dark red, brown and black—two different blacks, one washed out and one much stronger. Three blocks of fairly sombre tones float over the field of dark red.

In the early 1950s Rothko employed bright colours in harmonious combinations but in 1957, the year this work was painted, a perceptible shift occurred in his work. Fewer and darker colours were used, reflecting a more limited range of moods, including a preoccupation with death and mortality.

Rothko is an emotional artist, evoking many different feelings in viewers. One of the contradictions of his work is how beautiful the paintings are when he may have been making a despairing gesture about human behaviour. ‘A painting is not a picture of an experience; it is an experience,’ he said.

The layers of thin paint can create a sense of light coming through. One’s appreciation of the apparent depths in the colours is influenced by the way the painting itself is lit, with Rothko himself alternating between bright and dim. The work is not framed but is just stretched canvas, so there is really nothing between the viewer and the paint.

Source: http://artsearch.nga.gov.au/Detail.cfm?IRN=110506&PICTAUS=TRUE