Art, Poetry & Essays • But not necessarily in that order.
The beautiful gem like monarch butterfly inspires awe. They take an epic journey of 3,000 miles every year. They pass the adventure of traveling from southern Canada to central Mexico from generation to generation. But according to the 2018 Western Monarch Thanksgiving Count, the number of western monarchs dropped 86% over the previous year. According […]
Unlike Wassily Kandinsky’s Concerning the Spiritual in Art or Ben Shahn’s The Shape of Content, Mark Rothko’s own writing The Artist’s Reality wasn’t published during his lifetime. The book had remained merely a rumor among his friends and family until it was discovered by accident. Christopher Rothko has done a great service to the art […]
Rothko: The Color Field Paintings comes as close as one can to providing a quiet place to regularly meditate with Mark Rothko’s work. Unlike many art books, Christopher Rothko, Mark Rothko’s son, has wisely chosen to let the art speak for itself without volumes and volumes of text. The two introductory essays, one by Christopher […]
This book is for people who want to be a student of Mark Rothko’s life and work. If you’re not committed to immersing yourself in his letters, random notes, and the editor’s attempts to make sense of Rothko’s scribbles, then you will be disappointed with this book. If you’re interested in hearing Rothko in his […]
In the 1950s, Mark Rothko painted with striking color. Eye catching, heart throbbing, delicious colors. Then in the 1960s, his paintings shifted toward grays, blacks, whites, and earth tones. I have been told, and you may have heard, that the shift from bright colors to somber tones came from a descent into depression and eventual […]