Day two hundred and thirty-six: This afternoon I went to the Philadelphia Academy of Fine Arts (PAFA) with a few curatorial staff members from the museum. In an exhibition of abstract expressionist paintings and drawings, we encountered a small painting by Mark Rothko (1903-1970) titled Maroon on Red. Due to its diminutive stature (compared with many of Rothko’s famous paintings) we joked it was a “baby Rothko,” suitable in size for a New York apartment. To make my study here, I used the Corel Painter program’s “oil” setting to keep the colors from seeming flat. Even so, I needed to layer and blend three shades of red and two maroon-like tones to create a sense of depth akin to that in Rothko’s original.
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