Ariah FineFinal Art Survey Paper March 4, 2002

Mark RothkoMarcus Rothkowitz till 1940American born Russian 1903-1970, emigrated to US in 1913, citizen 1938“Painting” 1954 oil on canvas Nice colors, sort of. As in you don’t see that much orange or yellow of that tint all in one place at once naturally. But “who cares?” My firstimpression is some rich guy paid thousands for something my little sister could havedone with enough paint. I mean it’s a big canvas, so in a sense larger than life. I certainlywouldn’t try and make a painting that size on my Sunday afternoon.My impression? I see in it the millions of babies that die becausethey can’t get anything to eat, and the terrible injustice of oppressivegovernment like our own, but we don’t seem to care, we’d rather walk around humming about an image on a wall, trying to appreciatelife. You want to appreciate life? Sit in a village in sub Sarah Africaand watch some people die from AIDS, remembering that the wholevillage could have been well fed for years if that rich guy really appreciated life morethen a new piece for his foyer. And you know what else? I think it’s like The Emperors New Clothes. We think we have found the meaning to life in this 10’x10’ piece of orange, and it certainly must be because thousands of true experts thought it was specialenough to put in a museum with our tax dollars. But, I still don’t see it. Maybe we are toscared to look at the messed up world, so we finding meaning in an orange and yellowcanvas. Maybe we need to wake up to the fact that it doesn’t mean that much, and thatthe emperor is really naked. I don’t get it.Memories inspired…It’s like a computer: Yellow rectangle=Keyboard + Orangesquare = Monitor, an incredibly useful thing that we end up spending hundred’s of useless hours just staring at.Blocks, I used to play with, I don’t remember ever playing with blocks like these but their the sort of colors people would expect blocks to be. I really normally playedwith legos, which these could be, but then there to surreal, legoswere always concrete specific, fit together exactly to buildsomething specific.

If I turn my head sideways it looks like a yellow door swung open for me to look out into the orange world.An orange world, orange the color hazards, a cool color which now means“caution,” “don’t cross,” a world that from childhood is restricted because wehave been and are making it to dangerous to really live in.Always, careful, never crossing the orange to our eminentdisaster, Even people wear orange, to say, “Watch out, here Iam, See ME!” But we are far to busy being mesmerized by the depth of meaning in a painting and all it tells us about life to notice that person.If it’s not clear already, I’m angry. It used to be a joke: “you could sit and watchthe paint dry,” as if it was the most boring thing in the world, but people, I realize,actually do it. But my anger isn’t at the painting itself, or even the artist whose insides arescreaming to express herself. I’m learning to appreciate all that; I certainly wish I couldmake a perfect embodiment of my humanity. I guess I’m not even angry with those whosit in front of the painting truly trying to understand themselves and their world and thatother human, the artist. But I’m angry because it all happens amidst a dead and dyingworld.I guess just the system itself upsets me. Let those who don’t know Christ, do whatever they want, but Oh I pray there is balance in the Christians life, between theinspiration and meaning one might get from hours in front of a painting and the serviceand sharing of resource they have to a world that doesn’t even know a painting.I just saw the most beautiful art piece in the whole museum, it’s the girl sittingnext to me. So the painting evokes confusion, why we spend time and money on trying tounderstand this bridging of the gap and leave neglected that humanity of ours and othersthat we are trying so hard to understand. Non-objective Art- geometric shapes: top orange square about 2x size of bottomyellow rectangle. maybe it is a reducing of some objects down to its most purest form,like a computer, even if there weren’t computers then. But then there is the soft edges etc.like Monet’s time of impressionism. The orange is definitely forceful but the whole painting is at rest, not really attacking you off the painting, like Mondrian did. Oops,maybe it was surrealism and I wasn’t supposed to ask, “What does it mean?” If you look close you can see the running of the paint the yellow plop on the bottom being about fiveshades, and then- the orange stray dots of yellow and even some white, which follows thefootsteps (Liberation) of Pollock’s allowing the paint to leave the brush, even pouringover the canvas. “I wonder if he used a brush?”How has the artist altered the historical precedents in this contemporary version?Rothko, along with many of his contemporaries, but like none of his historicalrole models was entering an arena of art never entered before. The branches of this widefield of experience we call art, the Abstract and Non-objective were places we had never truly seen before. But, Rothko and his peers were pushing the envelope, like none before