Lessons from a Painting by Rothko

(Untitled, 1960 by Mark Rothko, 1903-1970,
American painter)

Mark Rothko is best known for his abstract paintings of horizontal bands of color stacked vertically up a rectangular canvas. “Often the divisions and intervals between them suggest a horizon or a cloud-bank, thus indirectly locating the image in the domain of landscape,” wrote the art critic Robert Hughes in The Shock of the New.

“This format enabled him to eliminate nearly everything from his work except the spatial suggestions and emotive power of his color, and the breathing intensity of the surfaces, which he built up in the most concentrated way, staining the canvas like watercolor paper and then scumbling it with repeated skins of overpainting, so that . . . one seems to be peering into the depths of mist and water, lit from within.”

The poet was inspired to follow the artist’s technique of repeated overpainting and wrote her poem as a pantoum, or pantum — a verse form composed of quatrains with internal rhyming and the repetition of lines according to an established pattern.

LESSONS FROM A PAINTING BY ROTHKO

How would you paint a poem?
Prepare the canvas carefully
With tiers of misty rectangles
Stacked secrets waiting to be told.

Prepare the canvas carefully
With shallow pools of color
Stacked secrets waiting to be told
Messages from some unknown place.

With shallow pools of color
Thin layers of gauze float over the canvas
Messages from some unknown place
Where soft shapes expand above a glow.

Thin layers of gauze float over the canvas
With tiers of misty rectangles
Where soft shapes expand above a glow.
How would you paint a poem?

~ Bobbi Katz, born 1933, American poet