Fantasy at Dawn [reverse] 1947

Mark Rothko made this painting, Fantasy at Dawn, sometime between 1947 and 1949, with strokes of white, yellow, and grey. I wonder what it was like for Rothko standing in front of this canvas, moving paint around like that, layering and shifting, as if searching for something, almost erasing as much as he added. I see a lot of tentative strokes, like he's feeling his way through the painting, figuring out what it wants to be. It reminds me of my own process, you know, that back-and-forth between intention and accident. There’s a patch of squiggly dark paint near the top – what was he thinking when he made that? It's like a doodle, a momentary lapse, or maybe a key to the whole thing. You can see Rothko was trying to create a sense of depth and space. I feel that artists are always talking to each other across time, like a big, messy conversation that never really ends. These paintings are frozen moments of thought and feeling. They're not answers, but rather invitations to keep looking, thinking, and feeling along with them.