the cave whose walls we first painted on....

Mark Rothko. Central triptych of the Rothko Chapel,
Houston, Texas. Oil on canvas. 1966

The Rothko Chapel, Houston, Texas.

1

This is the art of the beginning and the end.

Of the darkness of the womb,

coloured only by faint washes 

of light through flesh,

through blood.

Of the darkness of the galaxies,

or even darker.

Of space before time, 

and time after space.

Of the vast absence

broken only by faint clouds of dust.

The dust of stars that is our origins.

The dust of flesh that is our end.

2

This is the art of the innermost and the outermost.

Of our deepest within

and our farthest reach.

3

This is the dark, hollow music

of the Gregorian chant.

The thick stone walls of a Roman church.

And farther back.

This is the cave whose walls we first painted on.

4

This is the silent singing of blood in our ears.

The blood we are born in,

and our own quickened pulse.

The blood that will someday still,

and pool,

and cool in our veins.

5

This is the darkness

that surrounds us, 

that contains us.

That is us,

and is not us.

That is our essence

and our context, 

our matrix and our end.

Our forever more,

and our never was, 

and 

-- briefly --

our now.

6

This is the darkness

that gives meaning to the light.



Wendy Stefansson

red...

Albert Molina and Eddie Redmayne as abstract expressionist painter Mark Rothko and his assistant, Ken.
2010 Broadway production of John Logan's play, Red.

Red: A New Play by John Logan

Okay, I think we can all agree that the Peace Country is off-off-OFF-Broadway. Which means most of us won’t get the opportunity to see John Logan’s play Red, a drama about abstract expressionist painter Mark Rothko any time soon. Happily, we can read the script of the play. Even more happily, we can see clips of the Broadway production on youtube.

If I could, I would go see this play ten evenings in a row just to watch the scene in which Rothko and his young assistant, Ken, together prime a large canvas in a deep maroon; the older man covering the top of the canvas, the younger the bottom. The sheer physicality of painting is rendered as a dance, as a struggle. Both men emerge from it covered with red paint. They look like they’ve just come newborn into the world, or from a battlefield.

Red depicts Rothko at the height of his success but staring down the spectre of his own irrelevance. He is in love with, and at the same time tortured by his own ideas. Even as he creates the canvases that are arguably the culmination of his life’s work -- all in pulsating, throbbing, swelling, breathing reds -- he contemplates his own end.

This is clearly a dark work. It’s also a seriously intelligent work. It presumes the audience has a good general knowledge of art history from Michelangelo through to Warhol. But, at the same time it reminds us that painting isn’t just a cognitive activity; it is something to be grappled with bodily. It is hand-to-hand combat. It is, and always has been, a struggle to the end.

This article was first published in Art of the Peace magazine, Issue #15, Fall 2010. See it in its original context here.