Black In Deep Red

Black in Deep Red, painted in 1957 follows the characteristic format of Mark Rothko’s work, in which stacked rectangles of color appear to float within the boundaries of the canvas. By directly staining the canvas with many thin washes of pigment and paying particular attention to the edges where the fields interact, he achieved the effect of light radiating from the image itself. This technique suited Rothko’s metaphysical aims: to offer painting as a doorway into purely spiritual realms, making it as immaterial and evocative as music, and to directly communicate the most essential, raw forms of human emotion. Rothko loved Aeschylus’ tragedies and Nietzsche’s conception of the origin of tragedy, and because the act of painting put high drama in his life, he insisted that people see his paintings, including the black paintings, as dramatic. And some of them can be dramatic, of course, in the colloquial sense of “exciting.” For sure you need to open yourself to Rothko's work. They are everything, but obvious.