Sitting with Mark Rothko again……my wife first took me to see his work, and i felt it’s depth and what it required of me to encounter it! Still does. Re-visiting his work recently, made me want to learn more about his life….

Watched a nice documentary on the great painter and thinker Mark Rothko last night–sad and beautiful, his story and his work was just so nuanced and spiritual. I’ve sat with many of his pieces, and they have a way of changing you from the inside. It’s like an invitation to a real church or something that if you encounter won’t leave you the same afterwards.

This documentary of his life story makes sense and contextualizes his work as well. His jewish parents fled Russia like 2.5 million others between 1880-1924; he found himself a foreigner in a foreign land and, thankfully, didn’t hang his harp on the willows!

To encounter his work you have to “show up” on another level, as they say. And his art invites that I-thou encounter., which Martin Buber challenged us to live out! Good art should teach us to engage and empathize more deeply, and to live with more awareness of life’s levels and layers. Rothko’s layerings require us to enter beneath life’s surface to find a deeper meaning.

Good to learn more about his life and times. What an inventive time in American art, just after the war when the art center switched from Paris to NYC. Good to remember the context to interpret the art movement well. In terms of thinking: existentialism meets Freud and Jung. In terms of expression, almost brand new, but drawing on Kandinsky, Mondrian and others who were heading towards expressing abstract rather than representational, inner rather than outer realities.

His art chapel in Houston, alone is worth a retreat if you haven’t encountered real art in a while. Good reminder that some refused to not ask their deeper inner quest-ions while here.

I’m friends with these sorts of people on earth and beyond. They make sense to me. And their integrity in finishing some of their questions gives me hope.

As the Japanese artist interviewed in this one said, some people felt existential despair in his work, i kept sitting with them until i felt Hope.

I like that his art does more than invite, it actually almost requires the viewer to consider the meaning of life. Is there meaning? Is there joy? Is there hope? Perhaps, if you are willing to go just beneath the surface and then again a bit farther. As the Rabbi Rashi said of scriptures. You have to keep fishing the same spot for a long time to find the fish. The life is hidden beneath! But, you must be willing to fish patiently to find them. All great art, requires that type of fishing, but especially Rothko’s. Fish well to find the meanings beneath the austere surfaces.

It is the same with the church, or people, if you aren’t willing to look into and then through the surface to find the luminous fish teeming with life beneath, you probably won’t catch anything! Art viewing and life are similar in that way. But some artist are teachers of how to fish well. Rothko was. All great artist teach us to see, but some can also teach you how to fish!

And Rothko’s work does so in a peaceful way, without preaching or manipulation. It says, here we are, both human, let’s consider this together in this chapel. His art gives you room to be long enough to consider it. Selah, as they used to say after a verse or painting. Consider from your heart, almost outside of time. Rothko’s art does at least that much, which has gotten very rare these days. His art is like a chapel you need to pray in.

“His art is a space to decompress, and think about bigger issues in life. It’s not escapist, it’s exactly the opposite, it’s to experience a context on your own suffering and daily wonders.”

Again as the younger japanese artist said: “His work is a puzzle i don’t want to solve, but to open up to the next generation.”

That’s a good riddle, or something like wisdom, when art can keep an open dialogue across time, and keep reflecting our real quest-ions. A hidden joy, not an obvious joy, in his work, but one you must sit with, contemplate and enter to sense. But a joy and hope implied beneath the 20th C’s despair at itself. His work requires at least that much to know.

Some have described, while sitting in front of Rothko’s paintings, “deep sounds coming from silence”, and others have felt the “religious content” in his painting like an old testament Jew seeking God.

This would make sense, if as an immigrant Russian Jew, whose parents fled the Pale of Settlement, was seeking the ultimate meaning and context for our sufferings here on earth, and wanted to express his quest-ions in a way which allowed others to ask theirs. Perhaps, his works, especially his later works, are like Lamentations or Ecclesiastes (Qoholet) in the bible. They ask questions about suffering which can only be answered if you enter them deeply enough. He entered the questions for us, and invited us into their deep commonly human wails of sound, and if you go deeply enough, even songs of praise.