Untitled 1947

This untitled painting was made by Mark Rothko, and while it has no date, the way he’s pushing pigment around on the canvas tells me a lot about his process. Look at how the pinks and browns hover, never quite mixing, but always touching. You can almost feel the brushstrokes, the way he loaded the brush with paint and then dragged it across the surface. It’s all about texture here – Rothko isn't hiding anything. The paint is thick in places, thin in others, creating a real physicality. And that band of swirly gray? It's like he's inviting us to get lost in the motion, the rhythm of his hand. I wonder what it would be like to stand in the studio and watch him work. I see echoes of Guston in this piece, that same willingness to embrace the awkward, the imperfect, the messy. Like Guston, Rothko is reminding us that art is a conversation, a back-and-forth between the artist and the medium, between the painting and the viewer. It is a space where we are invited to bring our own experiences and interpretations.