in the halls of night's blooming jasmine

Untitled Black on Gray 1969 at MoMA

Gertrude Abercrombie (1909–1977), “The Ivory Tower”

oil on masonite, 1945

Mark Rothko Untitled (Black and Gray) 1969 acrylic on canvas 93 × 76 ⅛ in. (236.2 × 193.4 cm) Anderson Collection at Stanford University

On the dark paintings (this is very boring)

Hi, I try not to write things that are overly long here too often, because people mostly just want to see the art. I am sometimes torn a viewer too, I do enjoy learning about the art, but some art commentary is so ornate and lofty that one feels it could be talking about any painting by the time you're done. I think the emotional poetry of these reactions is apt for Rothko, but I prefer the personal reflections to the high-minded "Goals of art" speak, at least most of the time

However, I thought I would comment tonight, that I've been on Tumblr for 11 years, it's where I started. I like it because of the blogging format and also the people, who are not the usual art crowd but more of a mix. I like the reactions that people have to things who are not necessarily in the business of art themselves. Over on Instagram, for instance, a huge number of painters follow me. This is interesting in a different way but often has to break through the wall of the painter's own aspirations as well their attitudes towards Rothko.

If you have been following me a long time you know that I have a special tenderness for Rothko's late paintings and that particularly over the years I have tried to sort out the "dark paintings" consisting of the black and gray paintings of the light 60s as well as the brown and gray and including the 1964 "Black Form" paintings. I made this my mission when no one ( I thought) seemed to care.

With the black form paintings there's not that much to figure out other than trying to get a photograph that actually looks like them which is nearly impossible, but with the dark paintings from 1968 and 69 it's a much more complicated sorting process. Some of this has been made easier over the years with these new shows and scans from the last big retrospective, but David Anfam, the Rothko expert who died last year, told me that one of the big Rothko questions is exactly how many dark paintings there are. In his opinion it was still not known, and he felt it was the single biggest issue of scholarship regarding Rothko.

When I started, scans were terrible and it was very very difficult to sort out the large group of black and gray paintings and black and brown paintings. I did the best I could and I made sets of them as well as individual posts when I would get another scan. Eventually I would replace the scans in the sets with better ones, sometimes pretty much holding up a microscope to look at brushstrokes that are very hard to see on a computer in small size. Along the way I would ask Tumblr sometimes what they thought of the different scans. It was kind of an adventure, but somewhat frustrating in terms of being able to access something which made sense. Every time I got a new boom or a new computer, everything seemed to change again.

I lack time and money to work on these things but, I continue today to try to sort out the late period dark paintings. When the works on paper catalog finally comes out that's going to help some, but what's definitive and, importantly for us, what's definitive in terms of scans, is still a little bit thorny.

I have a number of new scans of these pictures and I will try to put together master sets as long as they seem like solid scans. It always seems like there's one stray painting around that doesn't look like the others and it leaves one wondering whether or not it's just the photograph or the painting itself.

These photographs are no small thing. If you go back in my blog far enough there are still in places black and gray paintings that look blue and back and brown and grey paintings that look brown and blue. This is not surprising there our number of paintings where the lighter area has a tint, that's just the way Rothko paints, but I have been getting some better pictures where you can see a number of different colors in both the dark and light areas.

The size on the Internet of course is a major handicap but I've been dealing with that since I started. So my intention is to make new sets and go through the blog and replace anything that's too old. Sometimes it's fun to look at the differences over the years from paintings that are the same work, but with wildly different photographic appearances. However, here I must try to strive for accuracy, which is itself a little bit of an artistic endeavor. Ask somebody who's done scans for an art monograph and chances are they will admit that there's a certain amount of "play" that must exist in the picture to have it print properly and transmit the feeling that the painting is supposed to have. While that part is very subjective we are talking about extremely small changes.

And to make matters worse, it's not all about photography it's also about the lighting in the museum and the places that works had to be photographed. Rothko is uncommonly sensitive lighting conditions and so many of the paintings when I started were photographed lighter than they really appear to the naked eye. It makes sense to throw a lot of light on something, it's punchy and you get details but there's something that you lose with Rothko's artwork when you turn up the lights. It can make them seem sort of more pedestrian than they are and the over lighting can increase the contrast to the point where you're not really seeing all the colors. You may have seen this effect in your own museum visits.

So here's a new scan, I'm sure it won't be the last of this painting or of any of the others probably.

I did not immediately see it as a single post, but again some of this brush detail, if obscured or over emphasized can make one work look far different than expected.

Nelson Shanks (1937 – 2015)