Mark Rothko

Mark Rothko, a Russian-born American painter, is another one of my favorite artists and a major influence on my own work. He also serves as another one of my excuses to make a regular pilgrimage to Houston to visit the Rothko Chapel. Though widely considered and abstract expressionist, he vehemently resisted being placed in the category, and often referred to his work as “mythomorphic” abstraction.

Rothko desired to take painting to the next step beyond abstraction to a strict interpretation of ideas, rather than subject. As he said in a manifesto written by himself and Adolph Gottlieb, in response to a review of their work in the New York Times:

We favor the simple expression of the complex thought. We are for the large shape because it has the impact of the unequivocal. We wish to reassert the picture plane. We are for flat forms because they destroy illusion and reveal truth.

Rothko’s work is typified by large canvases with large fields of color, sometimes contrasting and complimentary, sometimes analogous, sometime monochromatic. Rothko’s use of color has played a major role in influencing my own work, giving me the encouragement and confidence to be unafraid of color, and to use it as much as a mode of expression as the form of my subject matter.