SLOW SWIRL AT THE EDGE OF THE SEA
MARK ROTHKO, 1944
Look at this thing. Two strange little beings at the edge of the sea. Looks like they're doing a ceremony. Slow Swirl at the Edge of the Sea. Rothko painted it in 1944. And yeah — Rothko. Before the giant glowing rectangles. Before the silence. Before the big chapel energy. This is him in his weirdo surrealist phase. Myth-y stuff. Half-human forms. Things that look like they washed up from the unconscious. So — he painted this for the woman who'd become his second wife. Her name was Mary Alice Beistle. He called her Mell. The painting even had a subtitle: Mell Ecstatic. Meaning these aren't just surrealist noodle-people floating around by the water. They're probably him and Mell. Newly in love. Broke. Barely known. Recently divorced. Living in New York, trying to get anyone to listen. Years later their son Christopher remembered it hanging over the couch in the family brownstone. Before it was "an important early Rothko," it was just there. Over the couch. Part of the room. And the later Rothko is already hiding in here, by the way. The horizontal bands. The glowing atmosphere. The feeling that the real subject is the space around the figures, not the figures. Eventually he takes the creatures out. But he keeps the hovering. He keeps the silence. He keeps that thing where something huge is happening and nobody can quite say what.