Mark Rothko's Abstract Art

Mark Rothko was born Russia Dvinsk but moved to America with his family when he was ten years old. During the 1950s he became a central figure of the abstract expressionist movement alongside Jackson Pollack and other famous artists. Abstract art means it makes no different to the material world. Unlike pollack who used splashes and drips, Rothko is most famous for his rectangles and luminous colours. This style is known as a colour field which was pioneered by Rothko, Barnett Newman and Clifford Still, however Rothko did not identify them as colour fields.
Rothko’s work was highly expressive with strong emotion and depending what message he was trying to get across he would use bright colours in the background to give the impression the image was floating. Rothko didn’t give his paintings titles he preferred to give them numbers instead.
Using an untreated canvas, he applied a thin layer of binder
This was Rothko’s first time working on a series of related paintings which was to be viewed as an assemble and it was to dominate the rest of his life. Rothko converted his studio into a mock-up scale of the room his murals were to go in, although the room only had places for seven canvases, he produced approximately thirty individual canvases. Altogether he produced three sets of murals, the first set he was unsatisfied with as they were too light in mood and so he abandoned them and sold them as individual paintings. In the next two sets he experimented with structures of floating window frames and a sombre colour palette. The colours ranged from a fiery orange to a deep plum a and black. The Seagram murals are different from Rothko’s other painting, most of them are horizontal and larger in size. The cloud-like colour field from his earlier paintings have been replaced with a deep reddish brown base colour with red, black and light orange painted over the