Mark Rothko - Short Story

Many years ago bad days descended upon me, whatever I did, however hard I tried I could not shake off the bad times. I tried to cheer myself up by watching a movie. The movie had artistic merit but had a slow, snail-like quality to it. Nothing much happened for most of the time then suddenly at the end the primary occupant's girlfriend marries someone else, as part of a great conspiracy. In despair I watched another movie in another language. After eight catchy songs and endless fistfights and grave conspiracies by mother in laws I decided that it would be better to more or less accept my fate and not try to change it.

But one day a friend of mine said there was a public art exhibition which was held in the street near the university. I had never seen anything like it before…….oils, acrylics, water colors, pastels, drawings, and sculptures that astonished me. But what caught my eye most were colorful rectangles painted in a large canvas that everyone seemed to be interested in. It was simple but profound, I wondered who on earth would have first come up with the idea, and found that it was a painter named Mark Rothko who had lived in the United States and had moved there from Russia as a child in 1913. This method of painting is called Abstract Expressionism, though Rothko himself refused to adhere to any art movement.

In an environment where Jews were blamed for anything bad that happened in Russia, Rothko's early childhood seemed to have been plagued by fear. Soon after arriving at Ellis Island, his father passed away leaving the family without economic support. However Rothko managed to get a scholarship to Yale, but found the Yale community elitist and racist and started a magazine that lampooned the schools stuffy bourgeois tone. Being a self taught man rather than a diligent pupil he dropped out and did not return till he was awarded an honorary degree, forty six years later.

Rothko was a voracious reader and his art was brimming with ideas, and filled with mythology and philosophy. He moved through several styles until he reached signature rectangular fields of color and soon became one of the most prominent artists of the twentieth century. I was so intrigued by all this that I took up painting and soon my bad days ended

Sinclair Lewis

Sinclair Lewis was an American author. In 1930 Lewis was the first American to receive the Nobel Prize in literature. He had been awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1926 for "Arrowsmith", but declined it because he believed the standard for Pulitzer novel awards was too restrictive. 

Lewis' novels often satirize stupidity, mediocrity, commercialism or bigotry in some phase of American life. "Main Street" (1920), his fourth novel but his first success, is about the intellectual and cultural poverty in a small midwestern town. The principle character in "Babbitt" (1922) is a businessman who is a typical "go-getter." The preacher in "Elmer Gantry" (1927) is more interested in building a successful career than in saving souls. Lewis was born in Sauk Centre, Minnesota, the son of a country doctor. While at Yale University he edited the college literary magazine. He interrupted his studies to work as a janitor in Upton Sinclair's socialist colony in Englewood, New Jersey. Later Lewis made a trip to Panama to look for work on the canal then being dug. In 1907 he returned to Yale to be graduated with a A.B. degree. 

Lewis worked in a newspaper in Waterloo, Iowa, for a time. He spent six months in Carmel, California, with William Rose Bennet, trying free-lance writing but with little success. In 1910 he again went East. In Washington, he was editor of a magazine for teachers of the deaf, and in New York he became editor of a publishing house. He was married to Grace Hegger in 1914. While commuting to and from his Long Island home, Lewis wrote the greater part of "Our Mr. Wrenn (1914) and "The Trail of the Hawk (1915). Neither novel was successful, but in the meantime, Lewis was selling short stories to magazines. In 1916 he quit the publishing house to devote full time to writing. 

In 1930 Lewis won the Nobel Prize in Literature, the first writer in the United States to receive the award. In his Nobel Lecture, Lewis praised Theodore Dreiser, Willa Cather, Ernest Hemingway and other contemporaries, but also lamented that "in America most of us - not readers alone, but even writers  - are still afraid of any literature which is not a glorification of everything American, a glorification of faults as well as virtues," and that America is "the most contradictory, the most depressing, the most stirring, of any land in the world today. He also offered a profound criticism of the American literary establishment: "Our American professors like their literature clear and cold and pure and very dead."

Lewis died in Rome from advanced alcoholism on January 10, 1951, aged 65. William Shirer, a friend and admirer of Lewis, disputes accounts that Lewis died of alcoholism. He reported that Lewis had a heart attack and that his doctors advised him to stop drinking if he wanted to live. Lewis did not stop, and perhaps could not; he died when his heart stopped.

In summarising Lewis's career, Shirer concludes:

It has become rather commonplace for so-called literary critics to write off Sinclair Lewis as a novelist. Compared to...Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Dos Passos and Faulkner...Lewis lacked style. Yet his impact on modern American life...was greater than all the other four writers together.

Abstract "Primordial lake"

 

RJX

Cartoon

 

"Still Life" - Oil Pastel

 

RJX

The Harbor - Drawing - Oil Pastel

 

Destiny's end

 

Vincent van Gogh - A short story

Many years ago, I was disappointed with where I was as a painter, it seemed I was going nowhere, horrible days lay ahead, and I decided to give up painting altogether and do something like hiking. It was an incredible experience but most people said I was half mad to do such a thing. Unfortunately people take a dull view of hiking in my country and during those troubled times hiking seemed a risky thing to do. So I gave up hiking as a pleasant but unattainable past time.

I wondered what I could do. I wondered whether there was some theory that when applied would lead to interesting paintings. So I decided to analyze the paintings of famous artists to try to find a clue to develop my theory. For many months I tried without luck, but one day I observed the paintings of Vincent van Gogh.

Van Gogh seems to have been and oddity almost from the beginning. Childhood photos show him staring blankly at a distance. As a child he was serious, quiet and thoughtful. After working unsuccessfully as an art dealer he became a missionary and drifted into solitude and ill health. Perhaps in desperation he took up painting at the somewhat mature age of 27. Not only did he suffer from mental illness and poverty but he often neglected his physical health, did not eat properly and drank heavily. But what he created over the next ten years is astounding, 2100 art works including 860 paintings, which were so good that he became one of the most famous and influential figures in the history of Western art.

But what struck me was that most of his paintings had an element of roughness even crudeness. Take Vincent van Gogh’s “The Church at Auvers” for example, the whole building is crooked and the colors unnatural. But what would have happened if he painted it straight using natural colors, then it would be like a million other architectural drawings, competent but boring. I felt that the real secret behind a really good painting was a certain ugliness mingled cleverly with a really impressive element. The impressive element makes the painting realistic while the crudeness energizes the painting making the whole painting interesting. This was good news for me because I am one of those people in this world who is too lazy or too incompetent to draw buildings perfectly.

I do not know if my theory is correct but I used this theory to paint and came up with some eerie paintings. Of course not everyone was impressed some people called some of my buildings crude. But the important thing was for the first time in many years I felt like painting again.