Abstract

A frustrating day.  I had intended to go for a long walk but was deterred by alarming forecasts of, and then actual, rain. Various indoors type things have occupied most of the day. After reading about a renowned painter (see below) I decided to mess about taking some abstract shots with my iPhone and faffing around with Snapseed and Lightroom.

A first listen to a Johnny Cash album - American Recordings from 1994, on which my favourite track was the very dark Delia's Gone..

Mark Rothko was born in Russia in 1903 but moved to the USA when he was ten. He was a leading Abstract Expressionist.  After dabbling with surrealism, as in Slow Swirl at the Edge of the Sea (1944), he went on to develop the style for which he is best known.  This features large blocks of colour, applied in repeated thin layers.  This gives his large canvasses a transparent and luminous quality, which is only properly appreciated when seeing his work in a gallery with the right lighting.

His Seagram Murals were painted as a 1958 commission for the Four Seasons restaurant in New York's Seagram Building. The restaurant opened in June 1959 without the paintings.  I saw an exhibition of these at the Tate, Liverpool about ten years ago. In rather dark rooms, they seemed to shimmer and move.  Quite magical.