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Mark Rothko Research Paper

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I have struggled with depression for several years now. This semester I decided to take control of it, and conquer it, if you will. I was in a Creative Strategies course and I used that to face my fears. In doing so, my professor mention a guy by the name of Mark Rothko. Mark Rothko is an american painter who was born in Russia of a Russian Jewish descent in September of 1913. He was brought up in a secular and political household, and due to the fact that he was raised in an environment where Jews were blamed for many of the bad things that happened to Russia at the time, his childhood was filled with fear. His father, in fear of his children being drafted into the Imperial Russian Army, emigrated to the US when Rothko was ten years old. He went through school in the US, graduating with honors in June of 1921 at the age of seventeen. He received a scholarship to Yale, but it was not renewed after the first year he was there so he worked as a waiter and delivery boy in order to pay for his schooling. However, he dropped out after his sophomore year, finding Yale to be elitist and racist. (Mark Rothko) From there, Rothko went to New York where he found work in the garment district. While visiting a friend at the Art Students League of New York, he saw some …show more content…

Three walls display triptychs, while the other five walls display single paintings. These paintings were ones that Rothko started in 1964, as a series of black paintings, which incorporated other dark hues and texture effects. They represent his gradually growing concern for the transcendent. For some, witnessing these paintings is to submit themselves to a spiritual experience, which approximates that of consciousness itself. It forces viewers to approach the limits of experience and awakens them to the awareness of their own existence. For others, the large paintings, whose dark, nearly impenetrable surfaces represent hermeticism and

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