So this is really the amount of paint that I'm going to add.
And now I'm playing the game of additions,
and this is really when Rothko type painting gets interesting.
Because recall if I'm adding binder, and this is varnish,
perhaps used as a binder perhaps, and linseed oil, I'm going to thin that paint.
I'm going to make it more translucent, but I'm also going to give that paint body,
because this stuff, it dries, and
actually the paint will increase in volume because this stuff has been added to it.
If I use mineral spirits, temporarily I'm doing the same thing.
I'm thinning it, I'm making it more translucent.
But the net effect has nothing to do with translucency because this is going to
disappear.
It all evaporates, which is going to give me a more opaque,
less translucent wash of color, because there's nothing else in
there to push that paint, push those pigment particles apart.
That's really the role of the binder.
So what I'm going to do is a little bit of both.
And I'm actually going to substitute, in this case, varnish, dammar varnish, for
linseed oil,
because I want to add some surface gloss to this paint application as well.
Rothko's all about comparing and contrasting different qualities of paint,
and the matteness or the relative glossiness of his paint is critical,
especially as we advance through his career chronologically.
By the end of his life, he's making paintings that are almost, one could say,
about matte and gloss transitions.
And I'm going to give it a nice healthy addition of mineral spirits.
Now with the brush, and I'm not going to be crazy about cleaning my brush here,
because Rothko's colors are so complicated that if I use a dirty brush, it's going to
actually help, chromatically, these two colors relate to each other.
I'm adding a little bit of that deep plum color now to
this stain of color that I'm going to add over it,
which is to say I'm going to do something relatively subtle to this wash of color.
And because it's a wash, I'm going to be seeing through to this layer underneath.
So as an example, I'm going to take this color that I've just mixed up,
And give you an idea of what it looks like by itself.
And you can see it's also a rather complicated color, a little bit red,
a little bit earthy, a little bit orange.
But we're seeing some white through it, actually.
It's a quite transparent kind of paint.
And we're seeing it lighter than it actually is because it's so
transparent that white is reading through it.
And guess what, we're right back in the realm of watercolor again,
where the light source is the whiteness of the page.
Here it's the whiteness of the priming.
Now if I extend that paint now into a zone over that ground,
we're going to see something very, very different happen.
This is the same thing on top as that, but now we have a very,
very radically different underlayer.
And because we're working with stains of paint, such transparence results in
a very, very different relationship, wholly based on what's underneath it.
Now you can imagine that I've actually repicked up or
rewet some of that underlayer because that's oil paint.
It's still wet and it will be for a week.
Now if I wanted those colors to be very closely related, I would do that, and
I just did in fact.
If I wanted this color to remain somewhat separate from it,
I would allow this paint film to dry first and then glaze over it.
A week later I might add another glaze to that.
Now you'll notice that I've left areas exposed around it,
and this is a Rothko trick.
He's always giving you hints of what came beneath something else.
He's giving you an idea that there's something on the surface, but
I can't really tell what that color is.
Looks really complicated and deep because I'm seeing through these paint layers.
But if I look to the edge of it, I say, hm, well, there's something else.
And you can imagine if I made another layer here with a different color, I might
leave a little bit of that exposed on the edge and then perhaps work further up.
So we'd be seeing, in this case, three layers of color here, here two, and
then as I brought a third application up here, we'd be seeing a different two even.
So glaze after glaze after glaze of different translucencies,
different matteness and relative glossiness of the surfaces,
dependent on adding varnish or linseed oil, or perhaps even adding egg yolk or
something protein-based to not only opacify but to matte out your paint.
And what you can see here is just in this very,
very quick exercise, some of these drips, some of these types of brushstrokes,
these very active kind of brushy interfaces between different paint layers.
That really is the syntax for the magic of Rothko's paint surfaces.