ROTHKO’S LIGHT BAND

I can’t help it now.  Whatever artwork I look at, I always think, why didn’t they do that transparently?  It would have been so much more interesting.  I’ve said this before many times.  So, to ease my suffering, I thought I would take a simple and powerful painting, Rothko’s Light Band (1954), and see what would happen if it were transparently knowledged.

Rothko’s painting is visually interesting.  It is reminiscent of Turrell, Albers, etc.  What is that light and where is it coming from?  Is it in fact a bar/band?  Or is it just light coming between the top and bottom shapes?  As art, as more or less opaque paint applied to canvas, I think you are supposed to ask these questions.  That is to say, your asking this question gives the piece ‘meaning.’  It asks you to ply your memory for similar visual stimuli.  Have I seen this before?  Maybe?

ROTHKO LIGHT BAND (1954)

But when you want to knowledge a painting like this, what do you do, simply apply your two dimensional tones to your paper in a way sorta like he did?  No!  To get at this, to knowledge this, you have no choice but to use transparency.  And therefore, you have to make assumptions regarding what the form is.  I made the decision that the form is square in plan.  Is that a correct decision?  I don’t know.  Possibly Rothko, if we could ask him, would say, no, the top and bottom forms are intended to extend back to infinity.  And if he did say that, it is what you would expect an artist to say;  if all you are dealing with is a two dimensional plane, it is easy to toss around terms like infinity.  But I digress.

The bottom drawing does something that is generally forbidden within Transparent Drawing:  it has a background tone.  As a rule, I don’t believe in background tones.  Since we only want to knowledge the form, then the application of lines and tones to our paper should be solely with this purpose in mind.  Artists do background tones.  We are not artists;  we don’t care what the drawing looks like.  Yet, this exercise started with a famous piece of art.  And Rothko used a background tone to great visual effect.  So I applied a background tone, just to see the effect.

I also thought it important to give some tonal difference to the sides of the forms, to knowledge that there is some sort of rather indeterminate light source, which must be hitting the forms differently.  So this tonal difference I think helps to add belief to the forms, although this is a decision that Rothko was not faced with.

Wouldn’t it be fascinating to have a bunch of transparent drawers have a go at Rothko’s piece?  I would absolutely love to see the infinitely wide range of responses that would be produced.  100 Light Bands.  Sounds like the title of a fun book.