In my previous blog, I talked about how M.C. Escher used precise geometry and a lack of color to play with the brain’s sense of perspective. Escher’s designs are so playful and recognizable that I even have a few of them on T-shirts, but I decided that for this month’s entry I’d flip things around and talk about another of my favorite artists who took the complete opposite approach to his work: Mark Rothko.

Born into a Jewish Latvian family living under the rule of the Russian Empire, Rothko moved to America as a child and demonstrated an astonishing intellect, speaking four different languages at school before eventually receiving a scholarship to Yale. He started out painting surreal urban landscapes with elements of mythology and philosophy mixed in, but eventually settled on the style he has become famous for - what have been termed his “multiforms”.

Rothko never used that word himself though, and he wasn’t interested in being categorized as part a particular artistic movement. What’s impressive about this attitude is that he actually had a point...you don’t need to categorize his work because you immediately know it’s him. Nobody looks at one of his paintings and says: “Ah yes, that’s a piece of abstract expressionism from the mid 20th century, created as a reactionary rebellion against post-impressionists.” You just say...“Oh, that’s a Rothko!”

Mark Rothko in his 69th Street studio, ca 1964.
Photo Hans Namuth

While M.C. Escher was all about intricate boundaries and mathematical curiosity devoid of color, Rothko abandoned form and shape entirely, focusing purely on color and how two or three tones could contrast and compliment.

Escher drew with his mind but Rothko painted from his heart, expressing intangible emotions or feelings he was experiencing while creating each piece. His paintings aren’t really ‘of’ anything, but they are definitely ‘about’ things; things which can’t be put into words or even into images.

His paintings are about as abstract as you can get, because it’s left up to you to study them and see what emotions they invoke. How do you paint the concept of ‘tragedy’ or ‘doom’ for instance? According to Rothko, like this...

One of the difficulties you can run into with Rothko’s work is that you really have to see them “in the flesh”. Online photographs (like the ones I’m sadly having to use here) or pictures in books never quite do him justice, because Rothko didn’t just paint with color - he painted with texture as well. If you look at a photograph of Rothko, it can sometimes look a bit simple - a blob of color in the middle of another color - which makes it easy for people to dismiss him as pretentious.

But if you see his work on its original canvas, you see something else entirely. His paintings are rippled works of texture which dance in the light and look different from every angle in the room.

Even the color black could take on a character of its own when Rothko had a chance to play with it, and when you study one of his pieces, you start to see the possibilities of what a single color can do. Before long, you find yourself mesmerized because Rothko was able to take one color and somehow create a dozen different versions of it in the same space.

Mark Rothko, *Untitled (Black and Gray), 1969*

While Rothko would openly discuss the emotions and inspirations behind each painting he made, he was notoriously secretive about his methods, going so far as to hide his techniques from his assistants. In fact, many an art critic has looked at a Rothko and puzzled over how he’s gotten the paint to do that!

I’ve often been working on a piece myself, seeing how two different colors behave together in an attempt to capture Rothko’s magic, and found myself cursing his genius as I mutter: “OK how did you do it, Mark? Acrylics? Glue? Witchcraft?”

Rothko has always been a huge inspiration for me because he focused on color palettes and textures exclusively. He was an artist who wanted to show that any color you pick could become a whole spectrum in itself and while I appreciate that his style might be too minimalist for a lot of people, I have always found it bold and beautiful.

Having said that...I probably wouldn’t wear his paintings on a T-shirt.

Marcus Rothkowitz

M.C. Escher