Must Know Artist: Mark Rothko

'Magenta, Black, Green on Orange', oil on canvas painting by Mark Rothko, 1947, Museum of Modern Art

“ I realize that historically the function of painting large pictures is painting something very grandiose and pompous. The reason I paint them, however . . . is precisely because I want to be very intimate and human. To paint a small picture is to place yourself outside your experience, to look upon an experience as a stereopticon view or with a reducing glass. However you paint the larger picture, you are in it. It isn’t something you command! ”

He began to insist that he was not an abstractionist, that such a description was as inaccurate as labeling him a great colorist. His interest was:

"only in expressing basic human emotions — tragedy, ecstasy, doom, and so on. And the fact that a lot of people break down and cry when confronted with my pictures shows that I can communicate those basic human emotions . . . The people who weep before my pictures are having the same religious experience I had when I painted them. And if you, as you say, are moved only by their color relationship, then you miss the point."

---I remember last year when I visited the SF MOMA with my son. There was a woman who was meditating on a particular Rothko painting. My son started to cry and she left... I felt soooo bad! I really appreciate the color contrast and the magnificent size of his paintings. Science and psychology studies have proven that color does affect one's mood.