on rothko

Hello,

Sarah told me that she fell in love sixteen times last year. I didn’t know that was physically possible. Do you ever worry that other people see more colors than you do? Because I do.

I recently went to the Phillips Collection in DC, and I learned that the inspiration for the Rothko Chapel in Houston was inspired by the Rothko room here. Pretentious, perhaps, but I do feel like there’s something psychosomatic about those spaces—the immensity, the quiet, the low lights. All these effects do their best to drown your senses.

It’s primed for worship by a trick of the breath, like temples or cathedrals, a human thing of ritual. At least, I think I breathed a little differently when I stepped as close as possible to the center of each canvas and let the colors take over my periphery like a horizon. Or maybe it’s just that I was wearing a new bra that dug into my sternum.

I wonder how much of the desire to get Rothko stems from that last minute carpool ride from Austin to Houston during my freshman year. The driver told me about how she burst into tears the first time she went to the Rothko Chapel. And I want to be the type of person capable of that much feeling. I suspect that there is a gap between my synapses and someone who would weep to behold those big, dark workings. There’s definitely a chasm between me and someone who falls in love four times every quarter.

The last time that I went to the Rothko Chapel, Grayson and I witnessed a proposal. Per the rules of engagement in the exhibit, the ask and the answer were conducted in whispers, in symbols, and in gestures—a ring, a man down on one knee, a nod. The rest of us didn’t even dare to clap, though most of us raised our hands like we wanted to.

This was over three years ago, but I still think about this couple somewhat regularly. I’ve inadvertently witnessed three other proposals by now: at the corner table in the nice restaurant I worked at, in front of the Trevi Fountain, and on the lawns of the Eiffel Tower. And still, the Rothko one haunts me because of how specific it was. And I want to know what colors this couple saw.

Horses see in pseudo-sepia, and mantis shrimp know more hues than we can even imagine. I fear that I’m a horse while Sarah is a shrimp. I think that driver was a shrimp in that moment she described, when she was sixteen and allowed herself to be dwarfed by the immensity of Rothko’s black canvases. I like to believe that when Patroclus died, the horses of Achilles saw color for the first time—that the intensity of emotion can rewrite palettes. I worry that I’m still waiting for that to happen to me.

Faux Pas by Amy Sillman

This is a series of essays on abstract art. Mixing in notes of humor and awkwardness with a sharp sensibility and a feminist understanding of abstract expressionism, Sillman dissected this obscure kind of subjectivity in a way that I couldn’t even pretend to understand. This also happens to be the book that I picked up from the museum bookshop after I saw that proposal in this story.

As always, I hope the universe remembers to treat you with gentle hands,
Jessie