Seeing Emptiness

No. 14 (1960) (Credit: facweb.cs.depaul.edu)

Staring at the floating colors, I find myself weeping. As my eyes fall into the deep, red abyss, my mind fills the void with everything: love, life, grief, death. The gift of the abstract is that we infill its apparent emptiness with meaning. In this act, we face ourselves.

Mark Rothko’s fields of color have this effect. His large paintings loom over the viewer and swallow the visual field, producing sensations akin to a religious experience. You connect to something unnameable that is larger than an individual life. By containing apparently nothing, Rothko’s paintings contain everything.

Is death in there? It has to be. What isn’t in there? Nothing is there.

How can we see death? How can we know death? How do we wrap our minds and our hearts around a nothing? When we see someone we love no longer living, who do we see?

What do we see?

Credit: facweb.cs.depaul.edu

We see a physical form. We see the stories of our life as it was lived side by side with them. We see the archive of their life etched into a body. The scar on a knee, from a nail on a bench that sliced into tender, childhood flesh. A straight, worm-like scar burrows down the chest, a memento of open-heart surgery. We see nothing and everything all at once.

Death is the ultimate void. We fill it. We attach meaning to it. Our minds struggle to close the gap. Mind the gap!

Rothko’s color fields are emotional gaps. They slide past the front door into the lizard part of the brain, the seat of everything (and nothing) that matters. There are no words here, only relationships of intensity. Ripe reds, deep blues, a thin yellow line.

This is just paint on canvas.

If you find yourself in Houston and are looking for a transcendental experience, go to the Rothko Chapel. There, you will find a space that was designed around paintings that were designed around the space. Void in-filled with color-filled void.

You sit on a bench in the middle of a room and venture into three large, deep violet paintings that consume the visual field. They overtake you. They consume you. You would fall to your knees if you could even find your bearing to do so. It is dizzying, all this painted emptiness.

I can’t even put it into words, all this emptiness. This is what loss feels like. This is life. This is death. This is.

Credit: forum.sssrc.org