Thursday, January 21, 2016

Visceral Response

Let's talk about Rothko. Mark Rothko is a Russian abstract painter. This is one of his paintings:

I once saw this painting in REAL LIFE in the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. I'm choosing to talk about this painting in particular because it is the only painting I have ever seen that held me truly captivated. I remember walking through the museum with my friends and seeing this painting for the first time. I'm not really a "painting person", but this one hit me so right, it's stayed with me for years. It just kind of... feels right, like it's something me and the painter share.

The colors are so saturated and high value, and they transition pretty quickly around the edges into darker and darker shades until they reach black.The contrast between the giant, red-y orange color on top of a smaller dark shade of blue really just kind of makes this painting smack me in the face. Yet the meticulous use of texture here is a unifying factor. 

Some people probably think this is stupid. "It's just two giant patches of color. I could do that in, like, and hour." That just can't be true. You don't evoke feeling that strong from your paintings over and over again by accident. 

You should look him up... but you probably wont. So I'll just show you some of his others here:




You take a look at those and TRY to tell me he didn't do that on purpose.


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