No. 61 (Rust and Blue)

Three soft slabs of rust and blue, floating on a blue field at nine feet tall, built to make you feel something before you can name it (by the painter who hated being called a colorist).

1. 1
   The stack

   Top to bottom, the major blocks: a warm rust-maroon rectangle up high, a paler bridging band, and a deep blue-violet block below, all set on a blue ground

   The whole "subject" of the painting is these few soft slabs of color and the room they make between them. There is no figure, no horizon, no object anywhere in it. Read the blocks in order, top to bottom, and you have seen essentially everything that is depicted: the picture is the stack and the field, and nothing else.
2. 2
   The feathered edges

   Anywhere two areas meet (none of the rectangles has a ruled border)

   No block has a hard, drawn edge. Each one frays and breathes into the color around it, as if it had been exhaled onto the canvas rather than outlined. That softness is doing real work: it is what keeps the rectangles from reading as flat panels stuck on a wall and makes them seem to float instead.
3. 3
   Color that advances and recedes

   Hold your eye on the warm block, then the blue, for a few seconds each

   Look steadily and the warm rust block seems to float forward while the blue drops back, then the two trade places. Nothing on the canvas actually moves, but the planes will not hold still; they pulse and breathe. That instability is built into the picture, not imagined into it.
4. 4
   The glow from underneath

   Inside the blocks, where one hue seems lit from within rather than painted on

   The surface is built from many thin, scrubbed-on washes of thinned paint, so the lower layers shine up through the top ones. The color looks lit from behind, an effect Rothko called inner light. Hunt for the places where one color bleeds up through another; that is the physical recipe, not a trick of the eye.
5. 5
   The ground showing through

   In the gaps where the blue field seeps around and between the rectangles

   The blocks do not sit on top of a background. The blue ground pushes up around and between them, so the rectangles dissolve into the field rather than resting on it. That is why the whole picture reads as one continuous breathing surface instead of shapes-on-a-backdrop.
6. 6
   The scale, and where you stand

   The sheer height: the canvas is over nine feet tall, taller than a person

   At more than nine feet, the painting is built for the body, not the wall. Rothko wanted it seen close, roughly eighteen inches away, so the color fills your whole field of vision and you stand inside it. The absence of any object is the point: with nothing to look at, there is only the field to be in.