Thin washes, and a glow from underneath

The look of a Rothko is the result of a plain, physical method, and it is worth getting the method straight before reaching for any words about transcendence. He did not lay down flat, opaque slabs of color. He built each area from many thin, scrubbed-on washes of heavily thinned oil paint (pigment let down with a lot of solvent and binder until it was closer to a stain than a coat) brushed on layer over layer, sometimes a great many layers, each one fairly transparent.

Because every layer is thin enough to see through, the colors underneath shine up through the ones on top. A red is not just red; it is a red sitting over an orange sitting over a darker ground, all of them faintly visible at once, the way you can see a few inches down into water. That is what produces the quality people describe as a glow, a sense that the color is lit from within rather than painted on the surface. Rothko himself reached for the phrase “inner light.” There is nothing supernatural in the mechanism, though: it is layered, semi-transparent paint, and you can name exactly why it does what it does.

The second decision is what happens at the borders. Rothko never drew the rectangles, there is no ruled line, no taped edge, no hard boundary anywhere. He let each block bleed into the ground instead of sitting on top of it, feathering the wash out at the margins until the rectangle dissolves into the field around it. This is why the forms seem to advance, recede, and pulse rather than stay put: a hard-edged shape reads as a flat object pinned to a backdrop, but a soft-edged one, sharing its color with the field, refuses to settle at any one distance from your eye. Stare and the warm block floats forward; look again and it drops back. The instability is engineered, brushstroke by feathered brushstroke.

And then there is the scale, which was deliberate and which Rothko stated plainly. This canvas stands over nine feet tall, taller than the person standing in front of it. That is not grandeur for its own sake. In a statement he wrote in 1951 he put it directly: “I paint very large pictures… precisely because I want to be very intimate and human. To paint a small picture is to place yourself outside your experience… However if you paint the larger picture, you are in it.” A small picture is a thing across the room you look at; a picture this size, seen close, is a field you stand inside. He reportedly wanted these works hung low and viewed from about eighteen inches away, so the color fills your whole field of vision and there is no “outside” the painting left to stand in. The absence of any object is what makes that possible: with nothing in the field to point at, there is only the field to be in.