Friday, March 7, 2008

Mark Rothko



"Certain people always say we should go back to nature. I notice they never say we should go forward to nature."

This is what the great artist Mark Rothko once said. Does his quote not suffice for a whole month of blog posts? As I understand it, Rothko had the transcendent goal to spiritually liberate people in a time where modernism forces people into abstract lives that seemed to free them, but actually made them suffer on a deeper level. He valued the intimate and the human, instead of the grandiose.

It seems that art is intellectually way ahead of technology design. Actually art is a kind of technology I think. Anyway, there are vast fields to be roamed for inspiration. I at least think that Rothko provides some ideas that will help in the development of technological products that are sustainable on a spiritual level, and not just a material level. His often huge paintings might seem boring and require some intellectual abilities to already be present in the viewer in order to understand them; they are about the ideas that lead to the paintings, not just about spatial arrangement of colours and forms...

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