Orange and Yellow 1956

Mark Rothko created “Orange and Yellow” with oil paint on canvas. Look closely. This isn’t just orange and yellow; it’s about how those colors vibrate together. The paint isn’t applied to give the illusion of depth, but rather to create an atmosphere, a field of pure feeling. It's thin and washy, like watercolor almost, so the canvas is almost breathing through it. The layers of color are subtly modulated. Look at the seam where the orange and yellow meet. It’s not a hard edge, but a soft, dissolving boundary. The layers of paint are so thin that they appear to glow. Rothko, like his contemporary Barnett Newman, wanted to create painting that was pure experience. You might think of Agnes Martin, too, with that dissolving space. These artists invite us to contemplate not what we see, but how we see.