Recently, I went to Houston, TX to see the famous Rothko Chapel: a small, octogonal shaped room, whose walls are covered with massive dark dark paintings by famed minimalist abstract expressionist painter, Mark Rothko. This gallery-in-the-round is intended to have spiritual (if not religious) resonance for anyone who views it, yet the paintings do not contain any specfically religious imagery. In fact, they are pre-religious: they speak for the cosmic silence, the feelings of awe and infinity and vastness of God and the Universe by illustrating...nothing. Nothing but a black void.
When people first see they work, they think that it is black in color, but after you spend time there, you realize that they are very dark shades of green, red, and purple -- it's just that when colors are very dark in tone, the eye initially regards those colors as black. (In the above image, you'll notice that rather than three "black" paintings, there is actually a red painting flanked by two that are darker and more green)
Once you look into the paintings, however, they start to MOVE. There is actually a sensation of roiling movement, as if one is looking into a churning swamp. But what causes this movement on a still painting? At first I thought that there was something being projected on the canvases, say, a "camera obscura" effect from the skylight; perhaps light from outside was projecting movement from clouds and traffic outside down onto the paintings inside the chapel, with the monochromatic paintings serving as a dark movie screen? When I asked a docent/guardian in the chapel anbout this illusions, she suggested that it could be air turbulence from the AIR CONDITIONING!) I realized, after staring at Rothko's massive void-like paintings that the apparant movement in his work was an optical illusiion, caused by our eyes confusing the complimentary colors of green and red at extremely low shades or values, and then trying to make adjustments in order to properly perceive the color. After staring at his paintings at close range, I could see that they were made with layer upon layer of washes of green on red, over and over, back and forth...until the painted surface approached a black color. I hypothesized that when red and green are damped down to an extremely dark color, our eyes experience a sort of color blindness, for at very dark values, we can't distinguish a warm color from a cool color; we can't tell the difference between dark green and dark red. The result: a dark smouldering roiling effect optical effect, similar to clouds of oil spewing from miles down below the ocean's surface. Hard to believe, until you actually experience this optical illusion: it's truely amazing. Then again, it could be just "spiritual mojo", and I'll accept that without argument.
To those who have an interest in comic books, you might notice that the way that Rothko's arranged his massive paintings is similar to a comic strip. You can stand at one side of the room and "read" the paintings in a continous "strip" format. There is a triad of triptychs, at three points in the room; the triptych is a stand comedic comic strip format, in the question-answer-punchline formula. Also, the green and red colors reminded me of 3D comics from the 1950's. His subject matter was spiritual, but his composition was very much like comic book panels--each painting is either a full-page splash panel, or a two-panel page layout, and in the chapel, he's clustered three sets of them into three-panel "strips".
When sitting right upon the three massive paintings at the front of the chapel, I sense that Rothko actually had an impish sense of humor (or enormous feeling for the power of the artist) for at that perspective, sitting on the beanbag cushion on the floor (not pictured), I feel as if I'm sitting in a chapel to ART itself. While there are no religious icons or imagery in the chapel, there are undeniably PAINTINGS in the chapel. The chapel serves as a place to contemplate the infinite, as well as the phenemon of art itself. Is the Rothko chapel thus a place to worship art as ART (i.e. as an honest encounter for what these objects really are (i.e. PAINTINGS), and not as a simulation of an actual void)? Do we encounter the divine as an esthetic experience? Is there something about the three-paneled comic strip style of rhythm at work in Rothko's paintings? The Rothko chapel is undeniably a sacred space: a sacred place for you to fill-in-the-blank.
When people first see they work, they think that it is black in color, but after you spend time there, you realize that they are very dark shades of green, red, and purple -- it's just that when colors are very dark in tone, the eye initially regards those colors as black. (In the above image, you'll notice that rather than three "black" paintings, there is actually a red painting flanked by two that are darker and more green)
Once you look into the paintings, however, they start to MOVE. There is actually a sensation of roiling movement, as if one is looking into a churning swamp. But what causes this movement on a still painting? At first I thought that there was something being projected on the canvases, say, a "camera obscura" effect from the skylight; perhaps light from outside was projecting movement from clouds and traffic outside down onto the paintings inside the chapel, with the monochromatic paintings serving as a dark movie screen? When I asked a docent/guardian in the chapel anbout this illusions, she suggested that it could be air turbulence from the AIR CONDITIONING!) I realized, after staring at Rothko's massive void-like paintings that the apparant movement in his work was an optical illusiion, caused by our eyes confusing the complimentary colors of green and red at extremely low shades or values, and then trying to make adjustments in order to properly perceive the color. After staring at his paintings at close range, I could see that they were made with layer upon layer of washes of green on red, over and over, back and forth...until the painted surface approached a black color. I hypothesized that when red and green are damped down to an extremely dark color, our eyes experience a sort of color blindness, for at very dark values, we can't distinguish a warm color from a cool color; we can't tell the difference between dark green and dark red. The result: a dark smouldering roiling effect optical effect, similar to clouds of oil spewing from miles down below the ocean's surface. Hard to believe, until you actually experience this optical illusion: it's truely amazing. Then again, it could be just "spiritual mojo", and I'll accept that without argument.
To those who have an interest in comic books, you might notice that the way that Rothko's arranged his massive paintings is similar to a comic strip. You can stand at one side of the room and "read" the paintings in a continous "strip" format. There is a triad of triptychs, at three points in the room; the triptych is a stand comedic comic strip format, in the question-answer-punchline formula. Also, the green and red colors reminded me of 3D comics from the 1950's. His subject matter was spiritual, but his composition was very much like comic book panels--each painting is either a full-page splash panel, or a two-panel page layout, and in the chapel, he's clustered three sets of them into three-panel "strips".
When sitting right upon the three massive paintings at the front of the chapel, I sense that Rothko actually had an impish sense of humor (or enormous feeling for the power of the artist) for at that perspective, sitting on the beanbag cushion on the floor (not pictured), I feel as if I'm sitting in a chapel to ART itself. While there are no religious icons or imagery in the chapel, there are undeniably PAINTINGS in the chapel. The chapel serves as a place to contemplate the infinite, as well as the phenemon of art itself. Is the Rothko chapel thus a place to worship art as ART (i.e. as an honest encounter for what these objects really are (i.e. PAINTINGS), and not as a simulation of an actual void)? Do we encounter the divine as an esthetic experience? Is there something about the three-paneled comic strip style of rhythm at work in Rothko's paintings? The Rothko chapel is undeniably a sacred space: a sacred place for you to fill-in-the-blank.
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