Erik Wilhelmsen source 3 - Rothko

[1]Erik Wilhelmsen

Third Source- Mark Rothko

October 11, 2011

[2]

There are two main aspects to Rothko’s paintings that I’m looking at as a source to my work: monumentality of size and the multi-form blocs in his classic paintings that contrast, relate, and disguise what is underneath. Rothko’s contemporaries known as the New York school all created large works. “Rothko stated explicitly that he painted large paintings because ‘I want to be very intimate and human…however you paint the larger picture, you are in it. It isn’t something you command”(1). A primary concern Rothko abstractly employed was human emotion. Art critic, Irving Sandler wrote, “ Rothko’s mature work enlists the viewer as a substitute for the absent performer, that his pictures effectually cast the viewer as ‘an actor who plays his solitary self”(2). The size of his paintings as well as display in which his paintings often surround the viewer in a solitary room encompass the viewers space. (Fig. 1)

Fig. 1 Rothko Chapel, Houston

[3]

Typically Rothko’s classic paintings termed multiform paintings consist of one or a few blocs with a division between the colored blocs and surrounded by a frame or border. (Fig.2) To describe Rothko’s work some critics used the word façade. “The term façade is a face or front, often of a building – something solid, if not impermeable. The term façade also implies that something more lies behind what is visible, that the face itself is an artifice or an enticing disguise for something unexpected and possibly unwelcome behind it”(3). I believe this is an appropriate metaphor of the experience while viewing Rothko’s paintings. Through the division of space and large voids within the rectangular blocs the empty space seems to reflect back toward the viewer.

Fig. 2. No. 18, 1951 (207” x 170.5”)

Similar to Rothko I choose to work large to encompass the viewer’s space. In contrast I’m working three-dimensionaly. Physically there is the potential of interacting within the space I create, although I’m not inviting the viewer to neccesarly physically do so the potential is still there. My piece Untitled (23.4) (Fig. 3), is a large bowl form with a deep curve of the wall, the more severe the curve, the more the form displaces space. Displacement is important in this piece to evoke fullness. The interior of this vessel is literally filled with a repeating square fingerprint stamp densely banning the interior. In this piece I’m drawing the relation to the hovering allusion of Rothko’s multiform paintings created by the interface of blocs and borders and tone. In my piece the pattern is offset from the centrifugal form of the vessel. The banding pattern competes with the form creating a tension between the two.

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[1] Anna C. Chave, Mark Rothko (Yale, 1989), 7

[2] Anna C. Chave, mark Rothko (Yale, 1989), 16

[3] Anna C. Chave, Mark Rothko (Yale, 1989), 107