Woman Sewing c. 1934

Mark Rothko painted "Woman Sewing" with oil on canvas at some point in his life, though when exactly remains a mystery. Rothko's colour palette is pretty muted here, lots of browns and greens, which kind of gives the whole scene a somber, introspective feel. Look at how the paint is applied, it's not super blended, you can see the brushstrokes. There’s a tactile quality that lets you feel the painting’s surfaces, the texture of the canvas. Check out the way he's rendered the figure's dress, those dabs and strokes of brown and green feel both deliberate and spontaneous. The woman looks hunched, like life weighs heavily. Her sewing is almost a metaphor for the repetitive tasks that make up a life, both domestic and artistic. You get the sense Rothko saw painting as its own form of labour. This is similar to the intimacy and the mundane that you see in Bonnard's domestic scenes. Ultimately, it's the ambiguity that makes it so compelling.