Mark Rothko Paintings

In my attempt to introduce the children to a range of artists to show that there are endless ways to be creative I have now showed them the paintings of Mark Rothko.

As we were looking at the paintings on the Smartboard one child said, 'I don't understand what's good about these paintings.' EXCELLENT!

I love the honesty of children. Slowly others in the class started to agree. They could all understand the fun of Jackson Pollock but Rothko's work is much more challenging.

Coloured rectangles? What's that all about? We then talked about how colour and mood are related and how by using rectangles Rothko takes away any chance of us relating to any literal representation and forces the observer to respond to the colours.

Of course there is more to Rothko's work than this but children need ideas in a nugget. Enough to just give them a hook to make them take a second glance and not to dismiss what they don't understand totally out of hand.

The children then chose an emotion and made their own Rothko paintings. They greatly enjoyed the feel of applying thick layers of paint and had fun choosing colours. Nobody said, 'But I can't paint!' SUCCESS!!