Red on Maroon - Mark Rothko (at the Tate Modern in London) Rothko said of Michelangelo that he “achieved just the kind of feeling I’m after – he makes the viewers feel that they are trapped in a room where all the doors and windows are bricked up, so that all they can do is hit their heads forever against the wall.” Maybe it’s a testament to Rothko’s success that so many Rothko rooms pepper the world—in the Tate Modern in London and the Phillips Collection in D.C., to name two. If paintings can be all-consuming black holes, these are them. Look long enough and things can start to appear, things you’re stuck in, enclosed by the rectangles and enclosed by the canvas, enclosed in the room, enclosed with you. This Rothko room is particularly suited to ghostly rumination, the rectangles big, dark, and uneven; the other colors hues of red or red made pink or brown that pop and burn. Red on Maroon goes up and down. It goes left and right, inside the rectangle and out. There’s enough texture, jaggedness and roundedness to keep the eye moving—and when my eyes are moving around it, I think they’re circling, like they’re trying to escape the space. And when the eyes rest in one place, they might start to create something: a pyramid, an apocalyptic landscape, a hollow crowd, a monumental red archway. And what else? #Rothko #Rothkoroom #TateModern #art #painting #markrothko (at Tate Modern) https://www.instagram.com/p/B5tlPbQh3XW/?igshid=kqdik605d947