Mark Rothko fused color field
painting with the developing artistic style of Minimalism to create some of the
art world's most recognizable canvases.
His paintings often comprise only two or three colors, painted in simple
shapes that plainly cover the canvas and give no reference to subject
matter. The above painting is his Orange
and Yellow.
Again, approaching their art with
philosophically and theoretically experimental techniques, painters like
Diebenkorn and Rothko saw art as a more complicated invention than a mere
visual copying of the physical reality of the world around them. Abstract emotions and concepts must also
exist in the two-dimensional frame of the canvas, but in order to convey these
intangible elements the artist's approach to painting needed to change
dramatically. Here we just see patches
of color, but more focally we are looking at orange and yellow. By allowing these colors (mere pigments of
light itself) to speak for themselves, the artist opens the door for transcendent,
metaphysical significance to permeate the canvas as luminously and vividly as
the hues of the painter's palate. But
what truth or meaning do you see in this?
Within the blankness of such abstraction, transcendent significance no
doubt lurks, if you'll forgive the pun, in many shades but seldom in
definitive, outright clarity. In such
hazy interpretive contexts, therefore, might some of us be vindicated in
raising our own arguments as to the questionable integrity such art maintains
to its genre or medium? Do you think
this is art?
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