“I’m not interested in the relationship of colour or form or anything else. I’m interested only in expressing basic human emotions such as tragedy, ecstasy, doom,” wrote Mark Rothko, who in profound ways has influenced my own work. “The exhilarated tragic experience is for me,” he said, “the only source of art.” As an art critic there are painters who excite me visually and interest me intellectually, but as a fiction writer, and poet, Rothko does more than that; he invites me in to share his emotional and psychological terrain. Exploring nature in its most expansive and universal manifestations he has often been called a religious painter. But he is a religious painter for a secular age, providing what the French writer, Gaston Bachelard, calls ‘a space to daydream’. It is a space in which we can contemplate not only natural grandeur, but also the immensity within ourselves; the silence and stillness at the core of who we are.
The Romantics called this the sublime, while Freud refered to it as an oceanic feeling, something that connects us to our deepest selves. It is this place where we experience awe in the face of the natural world, or ecstasy when having sex with someone loved. It is as if, when we become still and really let ourselves feel a painting, a poem or love that we can tentatively enter this infinite expansive space. Rothko is a painter of raw and authentic emotion.
Born in Lativia to Jewish parents his upbringing was largely secular and intellectual. After he emigrated to America he was taught by Max Weber, a painter who helped introduce cubism to the States, and was a contemporary of Barnett Newman, another giant of Abstract Expressionism and colour field painting, both of whom were also Russian Jewish émigrés. Rothko always felt an outsider, as, in many ways, did I growing up Jewish in Anglo-Saxon, pony club joining Surrey. My great grandparents also left Russia to escape the pogroms, and though I had a completely secular upbringing, my work responds to the spiritual melancholy and existential sense of tragedy found in these artists. In the title story of my new short story collection, the female protagonist is in New York, standing in front of a Rothko, seen previously with her ex-lover in Paris and says: “And she wondered how it might have been if they had been able to dare and had stayed there together in that red vulnerable space, in a place of trust where he could have shed tears for his dead mother and known her, where she was neither mother, nor painter but simply herself. Maybe that’s what those moments had given her, she thought, standing in quiet contemplation in front of Rothko’s stained velvet red field of colour as the other visitors listened clamped behind headphones to the gallery commentary. Maybe that’s how she could make sense of the pain of his leaving, that for a second, he had given her a glimpse of a depth, a hidden strength she didn’t even know she had.’