It’s pretty easy to feel alone staring into a Rothko. I’ve only looked at one in person my whole life—Untitled No 11, which hangs in the gallery at the Nelson-Atkins. I’ve been told to stand as close to the painting as the museum will allow and try to let it fill up my entire vision. The effect is, needless to say, astounding. The feeling of the Rothko staring you full on in the face and leaving you nowhere else to look is not one that you’re liable to forget any time soon. It absorbs you completely; even standing in the middle of a crowded gallery on a Sunday afternoon on a trip with my art history class, I felt like it was just me and the painting.

The above painting hangs in Houston, in the Rothko Chapel, which houses one of the largest collections of Rothko’s works in the world.  It hangs in a room full of paintings that look very similar to it. And although I’ve never seen it in person, my imagination tells me that it must be awe-inspiring. The painting is just about the most intense expression of emotion that I think you can get. And it is dark. As with many of the paintings in my series, it is a product of the artist’s mindset at the time. The end of his life was certainly isolated. He was cut off from directly making the art he loved because of health concerns—assistants actually physically laid the paint on his last few works--and his family situation was almost non-existent. The chapel paintings were meant to be a religious experience, and the deep, dark colors of the paintings certainly seem to have a sort of religious quality. His suicide would come just two years later. This was a grim closing chapter to a tumultuous life, and that shines through in the painting.