Visio Divina - Rothko, No. 1 White and Red
by Kori Kelso

“Clarity” was Mark Rothko’s goal in the deceptively simple color field paintings that he spent the last twenty years of his life working on. With no imagery and no clues from the numbered titles, his paintings speak a universal language. Museum curators observe how visitors tend to speed up when they encounter abstract art, but with Rothko, they intuitively slow down. There is something inherently contemplative about his work. This could be in part because of their enveloping size. No .1 White and Red is roughly 9 by 7 feet, and is meant to be viewed close up, Rothko says. His works touch us now all these years later because as his son says, they know exactly “where we live.” They are a painted expression of what it is like to be human. They are filled with all that we are filled with: “joy and sorrow, aspiration and despair, fears and hopes, and fears about our hopes.” Sadly, the very thing Rothko’s work is celebrated for now, that all those emotions “live” together, was unbearable for him and his undoing.

“I am not interested in relationships of color or form or anything else. I am only interested in expressing basic human emotions.” In No.1 White and Red, we see three swaths of color, a deep earthy brown below a blood-red center all resting underneath a tremulous white. It was one of the last paintings that he felt “free to build up to the pure radiance of white.” These color fields seem to float with their loose brushy edges above a mysterious dark black background.

When asked why rectangles, his response was they are an un-shape. “That un-shape is what we see every time we open our eyes, so omnipresent that we are rarely aware that it is there. It is roughly the shape of our field of vision.” By using that silent frame of our field of vision and the enormous size, Rothko’s paintings pull us into a new world.

When I first saw this painting, I saw a picture of Christ. Grounding earthy incarnation with passion, violence, and crucifixion, all surrendered to a peaceful transcendence. The only thing that bothers me is how the different fields of color don’t touch. Once I noticed it, I couldn’t see it. They float in a sea of black with tidy separation between the colors. This begs the question, can we accept that all these emotions touch, overlap, and exist together, sometimes simultaneously? Unfortunately trying to keep those neat compartments and not being interested in their relationships might have contributed to Rothko’s ultimate despair and final demise.

We are told in Genesis that we are created in the image of God. A Creator that seems not to shy away from mystery or paradox as seen in the abject beauty of the cross. I think of Judas and Peter’s different responses to denying Jesus. Judas answers no to the question, feeling that sin and failure can’t be reconciled, and so he ends his life. Peter on the other hand is somehow able to accept his mistake and in turn Jesus’ forgiveness and becomes the rock of the church. In the words of Martin Luther King Jr., "We must accept finite disappointment, but never lose infinite hope."

It is only in the messy mixing and overlapping of all the disparate parts of us that we understand ourselves and the grace of God. In my experience, it often feels more like being in a Jackson Pollock painting. As Richard Rohr says: “God’s goal is always union, which is very different than perfection. A life lived fully and honestly involves both joy and suffering, a path of descent, doubt, and lots of little deaths that teach us to let go of our artificially created self and live in the simple joy of divine union. We are never perfectly whole, but that lack of wholeness is precisely what we mean by holiness or accepting the “whole” of reality.” Ultimately that is the goal of Spiritual Direction and all the time we spend in silence… to see God in all parts of life and see all parts of ourselves as belonging.

Questions to consider…

When you look at the shapes what stands out for you? What do the colors evoke? What are you curious about? What questions does it raise in you about the artwork or yourself?
What parts of yourself do you tend to compartmentalize or keep separated from?

For an online field trip check out the Rothko Chapel at rothkochapel.org