"The Unbearable Silence of God"

Hey Mandy, Mike & Josh - look what I just found! Mr. Rothko made it into the section titled "Negative Theology" in the book I am currently reading. After a personal opportunity to admire his paintings, I would not argue one bit with this classification! If only we would have had insight into Mr. Rothko prior to our vacation in Houston we wouldn't have driven in circles for so long just to find this chapel which the tour book made claim to be one of the "greatest artistic achievements of the second half of the twentieth century."  Apparently Mark Rothko "had the courage to paint almost nothing."

"The familiar identity of things has to be pulverized in order to destroy the finite associations with which our society increasingly enshrouds every aspect of our environment."

----- Mark Rothko -----
 

A Picture of Rothko Chapel in Nancy Pearcey's book, Saving Leonardo

Rothko & A Biblical Worldview of Art:

"What was Rothko saying with these dark panels? The person who commissioned the paintings said they express 'the silence of God, the unbearable silence of God.'

"After completing the panels, before the chapel even opened, Rothko committed suicide. An undefined 'mysticism with nobody there' is not enough. It does not fill the hunger in the human heart for connection with a personal God who knows and loves us.

"Rothko's work reveals the tragedy of the divided concept of truth. The things that give life its deepest meaning, that give us a purpose and reason for living, have all been placed in the upper story, where they are reduced to merely subjective experiences - private, non-rational, and ultimately unknowable. This is artistic alienation at its deepest and most painful. The Romantic hope that art could replace religion by giving meaning to life inspired incredible artistic creativity. But inevitably it failed. As art historian Robert Rosenblum writes, Rothko's 'passionate belief in art's magical power to save souls and to open transcendental vistas' not seems remote, its promise empty. All that is left is the unbearable silence of God.

"Clearly artists like Rothko were struggling with ideas that have life-and-death consequences - ideas they were willing to stake their lives on. We must never treat worldview analysis simply as a way to slap a label on a work of art and pigeonhole it into some neat schema. Historically, artists were not just making pretty pictures but were wrestling with profound questions about life - not through words but through color, texture, tone, and composition. Art is a visual language, and Christians have a responsibility to learn that language.

"All worldviews contain some grains of truth, simply because all people are made in God's image and live in God's world. Christians are called to identify what is good, and pour it into biblical wineskins (to adapt Jesus' metaphor). This explains why Christian artists are able to employ many of the same stylistic elements as secularist artists - taking what is true and pouring it into the much richer, fuller wineskin of a biblical worldview."

----- Nancy Pearcey in her book Saving Leonardo, pg. 205-206 -----