And as I have been reading I have become more and more impressed with Mark Rothko. I've known him for ages, well, known of him, I don't know him personally it's a little hard since he's dead. Anyway, in the text it discusses some of Rothko's work during the shift into non-representation, and I was impressed. He and other artists worked from ancient myths and drew inspiration from non-western cultures, whatever. What interested me, was that instead of painting scenes or stories or just borrowing primitive aesthetics, Rothko focused on the emotions in the stories. Even before he used mere blocks of color to express that emotion, he was exploring that aspect of humanity. He's quoted as saying "I'm interested only in expressing basic human emotions, tragedy, ecstasy, doom, and so on." I could not find a picture of the painting in my text of this stage in his work on the internet, but I put up a few examples of his more well known work.
This last one is actually a photograph that I took in the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. At the time I took the photograph because I knew Rothko and his paintings were famous, I liked the painting too. But now that I've learned even just a little more about him and his work, I think I appreciate it so much more.
And so before I go, there are just a few little quotes I noticed in the text that I particularly enjoyed.
"The big moment came when it was decided to paint ... just to paint. The gesture on the canvas was a gesture of liberation, from Value- political, aesthetic, moral." -Harold Rosenberg
"the act of painting is a deep human necessity, not the production of a hand-made commodity." - Robert Motherwell
3 comments:
I love paintings about paint. Whether it's soley about paint or it's representational and still about the paint. I hate it when a painting has nothing to do with the paint- it's just recreating an image. I figure, make it a little bit about the paint or take stinking picture!
YEAH, use the paint you're using man! So, aw man, I totally had something good to say while I was reading this entry but I have since forgotten. AH Yes, how would one go about making a big change in the art world, like busting out the whole commonly accepted idea of art? What I am asking is how do we start a revolution?
Zachary that is a question that artists have been asking for ages, and I don't have an answer. It's hard especially in our time because everything has been done. We've reached the point in art where it's been taken to such extremes that even pushing it further isn't truly shattering anything. So that's the question, what could an artist today, possibly do that would change things. I don't know.
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