Over winter break, my family took our annual visit to New York City. Normally we try to avoid "touristy stuff," after the first trips to 30 Rock and the Empire State Building in 2008. This trip, however, my mom insisted that we walk The High Line, so on a frigid, late-December morning, we trekked the historic freight rail-line. Looking down from the elevated path, I glimpsed a sign: "Rothko - Dark Palette." At that point, I grabbed my family and forced four, tightly bundled and hungry people to go to the Pace Gallery to look at the Rothko exhibit.
Rothko is a very important figure to my artistic development. He made me stop saying things like, "Oh, anyone could do that." Because not everyone can do that. It is very difficult, and he created pieces of various sizes and media. I have also always been interested in who he was, personally, as someone who connects to being an angsty, fiercely egocentric American painter of Russian-Jewish descent. Generally I prefer his warmer paintings, especially the red and orange ones which he insisted weren't happy because they were the colors of an inferno. But this exhibit was remarkable: firstly, I was not actually permitted to take pictures of many of them, because they were so deeply black that any photography could damage the work. There were only about a dozen paintings, but they entirely filled the four rooms of the gallery; most of them were large in scale, and a few were as big as the walls upon which they were displayed. The color scheme for all the pieces was, naturally, dark, but the darkness ranged from mauve to plum to deep navy to very, very deep black. From a distance, they looked like rectangles painted within other rectangles: up close, the paint was cracked, there were clear splotches of too much turpentine, and there were lines around the edges that resembled stretch marks. One takeaway I have, in regards to my own art, is to pay attention to imperfections in details: too much blending removes some of the most compelling aspects of a work. I also felt personally successful for making my brother go to his first art gallery ever, and for getting my father to admit that some modern art was interesting.
Rothko is a very important figure to my artistic development. He made me stop saying things like, "Oh, anyone could do that." Because not everyone can do that. It is very difficult, and he created pieces of various sizes and media. I have also always been interested in who he was, personally, as someone who connects to being an angsty, fiercely egocentric American painter of Russian-Jewish descent. Generally I prefer his warmer paintings, especially the red and orange ones which he insisted weren't happy because they were the colors of an inferno. But this exhibit was remarkable: firstly, I was not actually permitted to take pictures of many of them, because they were so deeply black that any photography could damage the work. There were only about a dozen paintings, but they entirely filled the four rooms of the gallery; most of them were large in scale, and a few were as big as the walls upon which they were displayed. The color scheme for all the pieces was, naturally, dark, but the darkness ranged from mauve to plum to deep navy to very, very deep black. From a distance, they looked like rectangles painted within other rectangles: up close, the paint was cracked, there were clear splotches of too much turpentine, and there were lines around the edges that resembled stretch marks. One takeaway I have, in regards to my own art, is to pay attention to imperfections in details: too much blending removes some of the most compelling aspects of a work. I also felt personally successful for making my brother go to his first art gallery ever, and for getting my father to admit that some modern art was interesting.