Untitled 1946

This is an untitled painting by Mark Rothko, made with oil on canvas, and it's like a visual poem, a process of feeling made visible. I'm struck by the brown background, it's kind of brooding, but then you've got these floating forms in blues, greens and whites. The paint is applied in layers, some thin and transparent, others thick and opaque, almost like Rothko was building up a surface, a world, through color. Look at the black looping line on the left, it's almost clumsy, almost like a child's drawing, but it's also powerful, anchoring the whole composition. Rothko’s work reminds me a little of the way Joan Mitchell used abstraction to evoke feeling and memory. Ultimately this piece, like all great art, embraces ambiguity, so what do you see? What do you feel?