Marjoleine Boonstra - Icarus Films Documentary - The Silence of Mark Rothko

I love me some Rothko, I've always loved Mark's art, take the beautiful opening shot of this clip from Marjoleine Boostra's 2014 documentary on the man.

Right away, with the bi-symmetry of the opening image, you can see how it's easy to just fall into his worlds, his sense-stalllations...


THE SILENCE OF MARK ROTHKO Clip from Icarus Films on Vimeo.


FURTHER RESEARCH REAPS REAL REWARDS: this morning, whilst trawling more Rothko footage looking for an interview with the man himself preferably, I came across this two-part interview with his daughter Kate Rothko discussing her father's exhibition in Rome.

And while it starts off with a discussion of the later black and grey paintings painted shortly before his death in 1970 stick with it. Right at the end of the walk-around, we end up in the PASTEL ON PAPER room. And he was pastelling at the same time as black-greying. I didn't know that Rothko experimented with this ghostly pastel feminine medium, AND I FUCKING LOVE THEM a lot.



FOOTNOTE: why am I finding it very difficult to find any real art-journalistic articles about Rothko's AMAZING late-period pastel series? I know there's only about a dozen of them, maybe fourteen is another rumour. The scale of these pastel-on-paper is much better than the over-sized oils. They're really something that's far more intimate in scale and intensity. Human sized, not garishly gargantuan as the oils sometimes tend to be.

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