first piece of the week

If you think you've noticed some changes on my blog you're correct! To the right I've added a section entitled Piece of the Week. It not only includes a picture of whatever I have chosen for this week but if you click the image it will lead you somewhere that will educate you further about the artist. Every Sunday I will introduce a new piece of artwork and briefly discuss it in hopes of starting some sort of discussion or at least a place for those interested to pose questions. The Andres Serrano post is still up for grabs, though.


Yellow, White, Blue over Yellow on Gray by Mark Rothko, 1954

While watching a program on the artist this afternoon on Ovation TV I became inspired to have this as my first piece. Rothko has always been an artist that inspires me in some fantastical way. I believe it has something to do about the interplay between his color fields and the radiative qualities each section possesses as it plays with the others and the viewer. Mark Rothko once said that the ideal painting has three qualities: romanticism, tragedy, and the clear preoccupation with death. Many art historians say that there is a romantic element to Rothko's body of work (especially in regards to the vibrant, lovely paintings), but much to the surprise of many it is his stark, dark, solid works that are the triumphant and joyous ones. Pieces like the one I have chosen, according to Rothko, are the sad ones filled with tragic players.

It is important to keep in mind that while Mark Rothko was working within the New York School of Abstract Expressionists, also known as the Irascibles (which included Pollock, de Kooning, etc.), the maxims to which he worked were very different for an abstract painter. Like all artists whose work seemed to transform over time into something more obscure and oftentimes confusing, they all started out using "traditional" techniques with identifiable "forms". In his early work from the 1930s there was an obvious preoccupation with color which stemmed from his admiration of Henri Matisse and the painting The Red Studio. Using color as the primary expressive tool was Rothko's game. Each block can be likened to a paragraph and how that paragraph speaks for the whole is what makes it "work".

What most people don't realize when looking at a piece is that they don't have to search for meaning, and the reason for that is because there isn't one. I heard an artist speak once about a person he witnessed at the Tate Modern who was looking at a Rothko. It was a large, red schemed, heavy yet staggering work. The viewer looked at it from every allowable angle as if "he dropped his coat somewhere into the space and was desperately trying to retrieve it but didn't know how to approach searching for it." It isn't meaning that you should walk away with, it is an experience. Paintings such as these are meant to leave the viewer with an experiential enlightenment. What Mark Rothko truly strived to do was create a cohesive space, one where architectural form and visual form could come together to embody a spirit of some sort. These works are meditative and majestic. We should contemplate them, let them become a part of us. I've never been so physically affected by another artist's work and it baffles me.