I've long admired the work of Abstract Expressionist painter Mark Rothko. Random Rothko was my entry in the 5k.

"In 1964, eight years after Mark Rothko painted the Sheldon Gallery's Yellow Band, the artist shrouded his studio skylight with a parachute, creating adimly lit gloom he found ideal for his work. Increasingly, if not systematically, his work darkened. His last paintings and large works on paper are his simplest; divided approximately in half, the works are executed in black over blackened brown or gray.

"Given the widely published perception of Abstract Expressionist works asrecording the artist's creative struggle, in which the process of creating involves an acutely felt, private existential drama, the somber course of Rothko's art seems a metaphor for the artist's approaching decision to end his own life. Perhaps it is. But Rothko's work involves much larger and more general intentions. . . . Rothko looked inward to find his own art; his search was not for simply a means of self-expression but for a timeless and spiritual image that captured the mythic power of primitive art.

"At first, his floating blocks of color were arranged in a soft-edged geometric arrangement, but later these were swiftly aligned in parallel bands of color, no longer in any way emblematic of totemic or pictographic imagery. They were wholly abstract, resonant forms with 'the impact of the unequivocal."

Diane Waldman, Mark Rothko 1903-1970: A Retrospective (New York: Harry N.Abrams, with the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, 1978) p. 39.

The visitor to "random rothko" can "paint" a near infinite number of canvases from an array of twenty-five colours and a pseudo-random number generator, by selecting the "+" or reloading/refreshing.

April 2000