Mark Rothko and the Sensation of Color

Few things please me more than turning a corner in an art museum and coming face to face with a Rothko painting, filling the space with color. And few things disappoint me more than watching museumgoers slide right by Rothkos with little thought. “Take a moment to bask in this color,” I want to say to them, “Spend a little time with him. Don’t dismiss him as if he were some sort of abstract expressionist equivalent of Lil Jon.”

You might even look at the work of Mark Rothko and say “I could’ve done that,” but the simplicity in his paintings is what makes them so appealing. All the major abstract expressionists we fascinated by the fundamental elements of art. Pollock loved the texture of paint. Kline loved the line. Mark Rothko loved color – much like his contemporaries Barnett Newman, Robert Motherwell, and Josef Albers – but the things he did with color are so distinctive that one may easily recognize a Rothko from across a giant gallery.

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Of course, part of the reason that Rothko is so recognizable from a distance is the size of his works. The smallest Rothko I have ever seen was about the height of a junior high child and wider by half. An average painting will take up an entire wall, giving every Rothko a sense of grandeur that is lost in these photographs.

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When you find a Rothko in a museum, step closer. Step so close that you can no longer see the edge of the massive canvas. Step so close that your face reflects the color of the paint. Immerse yourself in the color. Fill your field of vision with it. At this distance, the color stops being just color and becomes sensual. At this distance, you can begin to feel on your skin what you normally only see with your eyes.

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At least, that’s the idea. The idea that color, a fundamental component of visual art, can have sensual resonance all by itself. It raises a question that any experimental artist would find compelling – how far can you strip a work of art down to its basics and still retain some sort of meaning? Rothko found that you could strip a painting down to basic color juxtapositions. 

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Perhaps the closest analogue to Rothko is the aforementioned Josef Albers, and I want to talk about him for a moment to illustrate what makes Rothko unique. Albers was also interested in juxtapositions of color, but his approach was almost scientific. His squares are precise and clean, not rough and ragged like Rothko’s shapes. His scale is smaller, more manageable. His color choices tend to follow established ideas of color theory (which he wrote about heavily) and function not unlike controlled experiments in color theory.

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Rothko, on the other hand, felt his way through art, and each of his paintings are a testament to the emotional power of art. Through hues, we feel warm or cool, passionate or placid, serene or melancholy. As a writer, ask yourself, “How can I evoke the most emotion with the least amount of work?” It’s a tall order, but as you create, keep it in mind.

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In 1970, with his physical health deteriorating, Mark Rothko took his own life. His last major painting, a field of black on a field of gray, says all that needs to be said.

Read more of Vernon's work on Floodmark.