Everything Fading to Black

(HOMAGE TO ROTHKO)

He painted big to be intimate
Abstract colour fields to capture the human spirit
‘A fugal arrangement’ he said
‘Stolen space on a rich man’s wall
Tragedy
Ecstasy
Doom
… and so on’
And on he went
Filling canvas after canvas with feathered lines
Of vibrating colour
A window
A doorway
Or an empty frame?
Do they open out to let you in
Or close in to keep you out?

A lifetime’s journey into night
Sweet oblivion in spiritual obliteration
Everything fading to black rectangles
Feathered and layered in burgundy and blue
Huing back to black

Once they were ochre and orange
Burnt umber with lime green stripes
Vibrant colours vibrating violently
But gradually
Over years
They faded through reds and blues
To a simple existential nothingness
The spiritual end point of a lifetime’s quest

Can abstract painting capture spiritual ecstasy?
Can it really breathe life into its multiforms?
Are these unknown adventures in an unknown space
Truly a tiger’s eye of possibility
The passion of organism
The passage of grace?

What irony that one so embroiled in the tussle
Between Mammon and Art
Meaning and money
Should break all records at auction at Sothebys
Seventy-two-point-eight million for a single canvas
Would he laugh wryly or roll in his grave?
This tormented soul
Rothko
Spewing paint
Drinking himself into oblivion
Drunk on alienation
Everything fading back to black in a bleak overbearing chapel
His last testament but one he didn’t even see
A crimson field on his studio floor his final vision

Was that death the logical culmination of his lifetime’s quest
His years of reflection and exploration
Or was he merely hijacked by the usual suspect
The ab-ex affection for alcohol?
Was it a renunciation
A stepping up to a higher plain
Or the same old stumble into darkness?
A last articulate point
Or a final feathering of the lines
A novel way to decorate his studio floor?