Skip to main content

Rothko's Inspiration

I recently spent a lovely four-day weekend in Portland, Oregon with Lee and Brittni.  I love Portland, perhaps because it is so easy to get around using public transportation, or perhaps it is the great food and drink options, or perhaps it is because the city is dominated with a strong Germanic culture.  At any rate, as usual I had a wonderful trip to Portland and my hosts played no small part in that satisfaction.

Lee and Brittni worked hard to show me a good time.  I arrived after taking an Amtrak train from Vancouver to Portland and then using Portland's light rail to get to their lovely downtown apartment.  We ate some great Thai and American classic food, I did a brewery tour and sampled my favorite sausage fondue.  I visited Brittni's work site, Adidas, where I purchased a new pair of tennis shoes/runners.  Lee and I saw the first ever all Somoan movie and Brittni and I were able to take in a lecture by Chris Rothko talking about life with his father, painter Mark Rothko.  No surprise, father Rothko was very focused in his art, but spent some of his free time sharing his love of music with Chris.  Son Rothko also commented that although there are parts of the relatively new play Red that are accurate about his father, Rothko never had an apprentice.  The apprentice is of course a ploy to help inform the audience what Rothko is thinking as he converses with the apprentice

Brittni and I also visited the gallery show of Rothko paintings after the lecture.  Here's a couple of examples:
No 61 Brown, Blue, Brown on Blue


Untitled
These painting inspired me.  For some time now we have had three pieces of painted locker paper Paul purchased in Mexico on the wall.  I enjoyed the artististic way Paul installed them, but they had been up for long enough.  My local craft shop had a sale on large canvases recently so I made a purchase and started painting.  Here's what I came up with:


My Rothko inspired masterpiece

Working with the colours of the couch/chesterfield below it, I started painting. Since the piece needed  to be horizontal rather than vertical to fit the space, I deviated from Rothko in that way.  However I took inspiration from the way he repeated colours with one light coat over another.  It took me a few hours to gesso the canvas and then paint.  Once it was dry it was pretty easy to hang since I had just had plenty of practice helping a friend get several pieces hung on her bedroom walls.   The lecture and gallery visit not only inspired this work I think I might have to see Red when it eventually makes its way to Vancouver.

Thanks Brittni for getting me to the a gallery for the lecture, we barely made it in but I appreciated the approach which gave me this inspiration.  You can check out in person my Rothko inspired work next time you're in town.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Anatomy of a Sock

I've been knitting socks for a relatively short time.  One of the disconcerting things for me as I started following patterns for socks is the pattern designer assumes the knitter (in this case that would be me) knows all the parts of a sock.  So I thought I'd devote a post to improve my own knowledge about the anatomy of a sock and maybe some of you will learn something about the humble yet necessary sock as well. Here's the names of the parts of the foot as I know them. #49 ankle, #50 heel, #51, instep, #52 ball, #53 big toe, #54 toe, #55 little toe, #56 toenail. There are some parts more important for this discussion; first the heel of a foot is generally used to refer to the entire C-shape from the ankle to the instep.  Speaking of the instep, it refers to that curve near the bottom of the foot.  And what seems to be missing in the design above is the sole which generally refers to the bottom of the foot in total or plantar aspect in more technical terms...
11 comments
Read more

Gosling's Meme and Knitting

What is a meme, you may first ask? Well Dr. Richard Dawkins, an evolutionary biologist, came up with the idea in the late 1970's and stated something like: a meme is to a society what a gene is to a human. Both are an element or unit that can be replicated or passed from one individual to another. During the Internet age memes can be easily shared, replicated or otherwise passed on to another. Recent examples can be found on Gawker . Memes can include piano playing cats, a honey badger, the Call Me Maybe phenomenon and so on. The political campaign in the U.S. helped fuel memes using some of the most unusual statements like, "binders of women" and "you didn't build that." A few memes have staying power but most have a relatively short life span. Gosling's meme related to knitting has been around for some time; so when I again saw another post about him recently, it was time to figure out the origin. Ryan Gosling is a Canadian actor born in Onta...
1 comment
Read more

Yarn Usage II: Crochet vs. Knit

All four swatches were made.  Each is 6.25" or 15.875 cm square; each prepared with the same sized yarn and needles or hook.  It took 25 stitches to get the appropriate width for the knit swatches and only 20 stitches for both of the crocheted squares.  That already says something, but I'll get to it in a minute.  (Don't know what I'm talking about here?  Check out this post first.) Unfortunately, you'll just have to trust me that four swatches were prepared and that they were all the same size.  In the excitement to get to measuring and weighing of the swatches, no photographic evidence was taken.  Luckily for me the results of this research doesn't have to be reviewed by a jury of my peer.  This blog post will be the sum and total of where this information is published. The remains of my four swatches What can be shared, however, are the balls of yarn rewound after the weighing and measuring was completed.  You will note the size ...
10 comments
Read more