008 - mark rothko

I don’t watch movie previews. I prefer to know nothing ahead of viewing. I can’t remember how I first learned of Mark Rothko and his work. I wish I could because it resides in a special place in my heart, the first artwork to move me to tears.

I introduce to you: Mark Rothko

My Dad died unexpectedly the first week of January 2017. After six months of grieving the first loss I’d ever experienced, I met someone, a wonderful distraction. We spent the rest of the year together, but then she too was gone from my life. I resumed my grieving. It was the lowest I’d ever felt and I wasn’t able to sort or assign my sadness to missing my Dad or the girl. I knew only time would heal and I needed to keep busy, so after a 15 year break from the sport, I bought a skateboard. I was 29 years old.

With my fresh deck, I found the courage to skate to the neighborhood skatepark. Head held high, albeit terrified within, I pushed my way through the gated entrance. I didn’t see the elevated track for the sliding gate. The inch of steel halted my wheels and my body catapulted forward. My lead wrist, elbow, shoulder then hip and lastly back is how I hit the concrete. A few looked at me like I was an idiot and I sure did feel like one. I quickly popped up, remembering learning how to fall is an early requirement of skateboarding.

This was my life when I found Mark Rothko: sad and with a skateboard. From my computer, I looked at his paintings, hazy rectangles of color floating on large canvases, and learned his life story. The youngest son of Russian Jewish immigrants, his family settled in Portland, only for his father to die soon after. Years later, he dropped out of college and moved to New York City and began to paint. I connected with this quote of his:

“You've got sadness in you, I've got sadness in me – and my works of art are places where the two sadnesses can meet, and therefore both of us need to feel less sad.”

I knew I was sad. I knew one of his praised paintings hung at SFMOMA. And I knew in the end Rothko committed suicide. So I went to the museum in search of his work, described as mirrors of the soul. It was late in the day and I know I previously said I don’t mind paying to see art, but on this day, I felt differently. It was 30 minutes until close and I only wanted to see one painting, which hung not far from the exit. With no one guarding the way, I entered through the exit and walked quickly towards my target.

Between the last and second-last room, a smiley museum attendant stopped me in the divide. I thought I was busted, but I was wrong. He wanted to show me a feature of the painting he stood next to. A remarkably realistic painting by Robert Bechtle of a station wagon parked in a driveway. “Stand here and then go here. The car moves as you move,” the attendant said. With my arms crossed to hide the fact I wasn’t wearing the admission sticker on my shirt, I entertained his demonstration and agreed with the man. I continued my mission into the next room. There it was. Mark Rothko’s No. 14, 1960.

Alone in the room, I stood in front of the painting, looked deeply at the moving rectangles of color and let all I knew flow between me and the art on the wall. I started to cry. It was a grateful cry like crying at the end of a movie or crying because you’ve missed someone and now you’re able to be with them. My sadness was no longer alone. I felt relief and company in my grief.

“You might as well get one thing straight. I'm not an abstractionist...I'm not interested in the relationships of color or form or anything else. I'm interested only in expressing basic human emotions—tragedy, ecstasy, doom and so on. And the fact that a lot of people break down and cry when confronted with my pictures shows that I communicate those basic human emotions...The people who weep before my pictures are having the same religious experience I had when I painted them. And if you, as you say, are moved only by their color relationships then you miss the point.”

Since that day, I’ve walked by Rothko’s paintings with others and his work has meant or done nothing to them. I don’t interfere. How we see art is a personal experience. I wonder if or how my previous knowledge impacted my experience. I’ll never know.

This past weekend, for a wedding in Portland of all places, I saw my Dad’s siblings for the first time since his funeral six years ago. In their company, thanks to the mannerisms, I felt my Dad’s presence and when I eventually had time to myself, I welcomed more tears, another grateful cry. Our sadness is not alone. — Phillip Dillon

Here are a few other quotes of mark’s that made me think or smile:

“Silence is so accurate.”

“Art to me is an anecdote of the spirit.”

“I don't express myself in my paintings. I express my not-self.”

“A painting is not a picture of an experience, but is the experience.”

“To me art is an adventure into an unknown world, which can be explored only by those willing to take the risk.”

“When I was a younger man, art was a lonely thing. No galleries, no collectors, no critics, no money. Yet, it was a golden age, for we all had nothing to lose and a vision to gain. Today it is not quite the same. It is a time of tons of verbiage, activity, consumption. Which condition is better for the world at large I shall not venture to discuss. But I do know, that many of those who are driven to this life are desperately searching for those pockets of silence where we can root and grow. We must all hope we find them.”

“We thus see the artist performing a dual function: first, furthering the integrity of the process of self-expression in the language of art; and secondly, protecting the organic continuity of art in relation to its own laws. For like any organic substance, art must always be in a state of flux, the tempo being slow or fast. But it must move.”

“A picture lives by companionship, expanding and quickening in the eyes of the sensitive observer. It dies by the same token. It is therefore risky to send it out into the world. How often it must be impaired by the eyes of the unfeeling and the cruelty of the impotent.”

“The romantics were prompted to seek exotic subjects and to travel to far off places. They failed to realize that, though the transcendental must involve the strange and unfamiliar, not everything strange or unfamiliar is transcendental.”

“Look, it's my misery that I have to paint this kind of painting, it's your misery that you have to love it, and the price of the misery is thirteen hundred and fifty dollars.”