What do you think of, when you think of BLACK?
New York
depression
Solange
caviar
Louise Nevelson
death
Coco Chanel
polar night
Mark Rothko
computer monitor that won't work
Albert Einstein
black and white photography
Malevich
polar night
Mr.Bean (as in Black Adder)
what else?......
none of the above?
How about color? And what about light??
"I didn't start using pure black paint to show darkness. I started using it to show light", said Henri Matisse in 1914.As a teenager studying painting in the Russian Arctic I was taught by my teacher Maria Vlasovna (whose last name has been long betraying my memory) to never ever use BLACK in my work. We were at the time working on a series of still lives, or 'натюрмортр's. Russians, for their love of everything French, that goes back centuries, use the French 'nature morte' which literally means still, or frozen nature, or life. (As if you could freeze life! Oh, but wait, yes, you can!...) Our 'frozen lives' were usually artful, if a bit contorted, assemblies of artificial fruits, vases, draperies, architectural fragments and other art paraphernalia that were lit by bare bulbs screaming 'October revolution'. A sad yellow light was artfully sinisterized by an audio accompaniment in the form of wailing songs of the arctic winds outside small frozen windows, 4 panes thick. While we indulged in our pursuit of mastering the intricacies of high arts, armies of ignorant cockroaches were busy encroaching on the fruits of our labor, stored in the shelves in the corner of the same room. Always unbeknownst to us, they would feast on the sweeter of the pigments, leaving long nervously irregular lines on the surface of our watercolor paintings. And they would always be gone (to an afterparty elsewhere, perhaps?), before we could ever get to them. If you think you are seeing pure black, which you are not, use other colors to make it, was one of Maria Vlasovna's mantras. Maybe that's why each class was 3 hours long. Try concocting your own black! Years later I found out that while my classmates and I were struggling, sheepishly inventing our BLACKS, other, much shrewder - and real - painters in other parts of the world, would just go right ahead and use the black right out of their tubes. (I don't know about Malevich, but think of Solange, and of Louise Nevelson for instance) Cheaters, I thought! But I guess, there's right time, right place - and the right color - for everything! On a recent trip to Washington D.C., I had a couple of hours to spare before leaving the city. So I headed to the National Gallery of Art. There were two shows there that I wanted to see in particular. One of them was 'In the Tower: Mark Rothko'. It was housed above the rest of the museum, in a trapezoidal self-contained space and consisted of 7 "black" canvases completed in 1964. Since I had never seen Rothko's black paintings before, I wanted to find out for myself which team he belonged to: Maria Vlasovna's, or that of the Cheaters'. It especially mattered to me since he, like I, was born in Latvia; and my national pride was on the line. My investigation produced unexpected results. How else would you qualify my discovery that his black canvases were ..ahemm.. alive. Before you think I am crazy, let me explain. I was sitting peacefully on one of the benches in the nearly empty gallery, facing Nr. 5, a 2m x 2m 'black' canvas (the same one that these two women on the photograph below are facing), and staring at it intently for a while. The presence of colors was evident. They came in endless variations of tone, density, with fields of them leaking, dripping, floating and glossing over and peaking out from under one another. There were reds and purples (which in themselves contain reds), blues and greens (which contain blues), and there were browns (which contain reds and blues), and so on. Maria Vlasovna would have indeed triumphed!
Then something strange happened. As I was lowering my glance, still on Nr.5, a slightly brighter spot in the top part of the painting slid right behind one of the dark layers of paint below it. I instinctively looked right up, and there it was, this spot, back where it was a second ago. I repeated my move, experimenting with it again and again, and the same thing happened over and over again. Rothko's spot was playing peek-a-boo with me! For a moment there, in a particularly ambitious fit, I thought perhaps Rothko is trying to communicate something to me?! But I quickly changed my mind, because I wasn't getting the message (it wasn't very clear!). And to admit later that I was called upon by the late master and failed to respond would be too embarrassing. And besides, why me?! There are many better deserving people out there. Like Maria Vlasovna. Or like one of Rothko's students. Also, this was happening at the National Gallery of Art and not at some Afterlife Anonymous convention. This was ridiculous.
To make matters even more peculiar, I started noticing that fields and lines were 'moving' in the other paintings too, a 3D performance of colorful blacks unfolding in front of my confused eyes...
In retrospect, a couple of things were happening, I think. Firstly, as I became more immersed in the large canvasses, my mind became calmer and turned inwards. And in there, files upon files, lye visual images I had acquired in the past that were now somehow becoming alive. (Was I inadvertently entering a mediative state? No doubt!) And secondly, what I had observed in the peek-a-boo spot and the other kinetic oddities were some peculiarities in the way my eyes work, with their lifetime of microscopic injuries, anatomical irregularities, pressure, dust, eyelash patterns (our personal built-in light diffusers), and even the tiny accidental speckles on my eyeglasses! All of this instigated by Rothko's 'black' canvases. So, with all this in mind, what else had I seen in my long history of looking that I perceived in a certain way thinking that that's EXACTLY what it looked like, while in fact every one of us would perceive it differently, depending on the peculiarities of our own eyesight, the quality of light, even on the brand of mascara or eyeglasses we are wearing. Take colors for instance. Have you ever had to argue with someone about whether something was red or orange?... Do you see my point?
For Rothko, painting was a mixture of philosophical and physical activity. The order of a thought, and disorder of an impulse had to arrive at an agreeable - if not perfect - junction. (paraphrasing Friedrich Nietzsche by whose work Rothko was deeply influenced) He was very protective of his work space. Hence, there are no photographs of him painting. I can only guess how he worked, the deep thinker, the intense feeler and the unwavering hard working artist that he was, and what went through his mind, as he took weeks and months to complete his paintings. Imagine how much of the weighed, calculated intensity went into each stroke!
Whatever it was that transpired in that brightly lit room, it reinforced my belief that ultimately we each have to do our own work of looking at and interpreting a work of art. You know how your eyes adapt to the dark if you stay in it for some 60 seconds? If you give at least that much time to one of Rothko's 'black' paintings, for instance, you will start seeing beyond the obvious. And that's very helpful when you look at something that is not at all known. Like BLACK! I can say for myself, that in this small collection of Mark Rothko's blacks on view in the Tower, I saw Light, and I saw Color. Both Matisse and Maria Vlasovna would be glad.
In the Tower: Mark Rothko at the National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C. The show runs until January 2011.
