Rothko’s work must be seen in person.  Little jpgs just are blocks of color, but his paintings are really so much more.  Rothko painted intimate paintings, that is why there were painted so large.  He once said that the ideal viewing distance was 18 inches.  I’d suggested seeing work in person and just standing looking at one for half a minute then explore the painting.  It can be amazing.

Now that I’m living in both New York and Portland I get both of these connections.  Rothko attended Lincoln high school in Portland and had his first solo show at the Portland Art Museum in 1933.  He spent the rest of his life in New York.  The Portland Art Museum (PAM) should really get a major Rothko.  Any big collector willing to step up for a permanent one?

I can spend lots of time looking at his work.  I can lose myself in a very good way.  Regardless of what is happening or who is talking around me, I can often feel solitary in front of a Rothko.

It was great to see Rothko’s “Homage to Matisse” visit PAM.  Matisse’s use of color profoundly influenced Rothko. When Matisse’s “Red Studio” was installed at MoMA in 1949, Rothko visited it every day for months. By the end of that year, Rothko’s work that was started in 1946 became more clearly what we all recognize. At one point Rothko told his 2nd wife that he owed his achievements in art to Matisse and especially “Red Studio”.

A couple of years ago I visited the Rothko Chapel in Houston.  There is a writeup in the guardian about a visit to the Rothko Chapel that is worth a read: http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2008/sep/01/art

As I right this I’m listening to Mogwai’s new album “The Hawk is Howling.”  The songs somehow fit how I feel sometimes when I’m in front of his paintings.  I think I’m going to have to put it on my shuffle and head over to MoMA this week.

I’ll end this with a couple of Rothko’s quotes:

“A picture lives by companionship, expanding and quickening in the eyes of the sensitive observer, it dies by the same token. It is therefore it is a risky act to send it out into the world.” Mark Rothko

“It is a widely accepted notion among painters that it does not matter what one paints as long as it is well painted. This is the essence of academicism. There is no such thing as good painting about nothing.” Mark Rothko

“And if you say you are moved only by their color relationships then you miss the point.” Mark Rothko

…on need to demolish the usual identity of things

“in order to destroy the finite associations with which our society increasingly enshrouds every aspect of our environment.” Mark Rothko

But if colors were truly primary, I would not have been fighting with color adjustments late last night. Simply put, 3 or 4 primary pigments are not enough to represent what we can see — so they can’t be primary. Next time you hear a printer remind you that CMYK doesn’t have as much gamut as RGB on your screen you know that is a code phrase for “there aren’t primary colors, or secondary either”.

I went by Powell’s Books today to look for John Gage’s new book which they didn’t have, but I saw that the 3 copies of his previous color book had been sold. “Color and Meaning: Art, Science, and Symbolism” by John Gage (ISBN 0-520-22611-9). In a previous blog I recommended it for any art student really interested in color. Cool, hopefully some Portlanders took me up my recommendation.

Does anyone have any thoughts or a review of John Gage’s 2006 book “Color in Art” ? If so, post a comment, I’d appreciate it.

So let’s look at the western history of what color represents male and female:

• 18th century Gobineau: (female=black, male=white)
• 1809 Philipp Otto Runge: (female=blue/violet, male=yellow/orange)
• 1910 Franz Marc: (female=yellow, male=blue)
• 1914 The Sunday Sentinal [American woman's magazine/newspaper] (female=pink, male=blue)

Now, we all know the one color of sex is…

By the way, we are better than most mammals who are di-chromatic, yes fido doesn’t see in black and white, she’s just a bit more color blind than we are. In fact this is a clue to evolution as we likely had 4 cones and lost 2 as small mammals running in tunnels (also lost the oil globules as that allows more light to hit the cones at night). Then another mutation in great apes of the green cone gave us an imperfectly spaced red cone back.

One theory is the evolutionary advantage of red is not to find brightly colored fruits, but to allow great apes (leaf-eaters) be able to distinguish a younger and better eating young green (slightly red tinged leaf). You can read more about this in research by Peter Lucas {sorry I have printed journal articles, but I can’t find them online since I’m in a bit of a hurry).

You can read more specifically about bird vision and our likely evolutionary mammalian evolution in an interesting article in Scientific American (July 2006) called “What Birds See: Evolution has endowed birds with a system of color vision that surpasses that of all mammals, including humans” by Timothy H. Goldsmith.

OK, toss his meanings, everyone talks of primary colors, only a few paints are needed mixed to make other colors, must be true. Right?

OK play that forward, we have the primary inks of printing, CMYK (Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, Black), from that we can print anything… hey wait a minute why do the new fancy pro printers have 8 inks …and they do create better looking images. Maybe inks and paints aren’t as primary as we were taught in school.

The only true primaries in human perception is our 3 primary cones red, green, blue, but more about them and the imperfect human color vision in a later post.

Why are primaries always so political?

Did you know Newton divided the color spectrum into 7 parts ROYGBIV, analogous to 7 notes CDEFGAB, because he wanted a one-to-one correspondence of color with music. Too bad our brain is wired completely differently for sound and color.

OK, Newton was a genius but that should serve as a reminder of how easy to get stuck on your pet ideas.

Goethe, Newton, Albers, etc. all part of eternally fruitless search for principles of visual harmony that goes back to antiquity. You really need to look at John Gage’s book mentioned in the last posting (modern phrenology #2: poetic injustice)

I noticed in Portland’s Powells book store that a new book was written by John Gage, but I didn’t get a chance to thumb through it. I need to take a look at it next time I get a chance.

… of course you could avoid learning more and just create work based on passe color theories and plan your every move every day by the bumps on your head.

It has some fundamental flaws. Surely compliments give clues to harmonies? (“Quite calling me Shirley” sorry had to do the nod to Airplane!). Basically if you know the complements then you can use logic to determine the primaries.

Here is the problem with that logic. Stare at red disk then white, the after-image is blue/green (cyan), however since 1800’s compliment described as green partially because painting system of (red,blue,yellow), the compliment “must” be equal mix of other two yellow/red. Again wrong. It is cyan in your eye or I should say as interpreted in your mind by the leftovers of over-stimulation of your cone.

Highly recommended reading for any art student really interested in color: “Color and Meaning: Art, Science, and Symbolism” by John Gage (ISBN 0-520-22611-9)

Some scientific geniuses can be wrong as well, more on the next in this series.

Culture conditions the colors we see. Culture can also mis-inform and mis-shape how we express ourselves. But I guess if everyone is working on the same fallacies…

colors:
• yellow
• green
• red
• white
• blue

things:

• sun
• plants
• earth
• water
• fire
• cloud
• sky

Should be pretty easy. But most westerners almost certainly made two fundamental mistakes. While traveling in Ladakh, a Buddhist region in the Indian Himalayas, I visited many Gompa’s and Monasteries which have many prayer flags (similar to Tibetan traditions). In Ladakh, the colors have the following meanings (yellow:earth, green:water, red:fire, white:cloud,blue:sky). Makes sense the barren mountains are pretty yellow in color and of course water will make things green, and also some of the rivers due to mineral content look a bit green.

So that bump on your head really means what? In my case that bump meant
I was in another low-clearance country with beams placed a bit to low
from my 6′ frame.

Yes, travel informs my art.