9.18 min.
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"Music for Mark Rothko". Max Ridgway - guitar synthesizer, Randall Colbourne - drums. Recorded on February 7, 2012.
Mark Rothko is usually classified as an Abstract Expressionist though he resisted being labeled as an abstract painter. "You might as well get one thing straight," he said, "I'm not an abstract artist... I'm not interested in the relationship between color and form or anything else. I'm interested only in expressing basic human emotions - tragedy, ecstacy, doom, and so on. The fact that a lot of people break down and cry when confronted with my pictures shows that I can communicate these basic human emotions... The people who weep before my pictures are having the same religious experience as I had when I painted them."
For Rothko the creation of a work of art was a kind of rite, and he was extremely secretive about how it was done. His general method was to apply a thin layer of binder mixed with pigment directly onto uncoated and untreated canvas, and to paint significantly thinned oils directly onto this layer, creating a dense mixture of overlapping colors and shapes. His brush strokes were fast and light, a method he would continue to use until his death.
He once admitted to fellow artist Robert Motherwell that he worked under high-intensity lights arranged like stage lights. However, when his works were shown, he insisted on extremely low light, so muted that the colors seemed to hover in indefinte space.
Rothko's last paintings were painted in stark blacks and greys, reflecting his increasingly troubled state of mind. In the last year of his life, his drinking problem was out of control and he was taking heavy doses of barbituates and anti-depressants. Early in 1970 he committed suicide, slashing the veins inside the crooks of his arms and bled to death.
Tags: abstract expressionism free improvisation guitar synthesizer
