Rothko’s Chapel

A work of creative nonfiction
by Helen Ruggieri

Mark Rothko’s Chapel is a series of huge, wall-sized paintings, something like scenery flats, creating an entire room here within the National Gallery in Washington, DC. These chilling canvases appear to be a matte black, though the blurb says deep crimson and purple. So dark. So chilling. I sit on a bench in the faux dark.

I’m tired. I’ve just flown back from Japan on a thirteen-hour flight and gotten up early and walked to several monuments and memorials—Jefferson, Lincoln, Roosevelt, Vietnam. My feet hurt. And if I expected Washington to be cooler in July than Yokohama is, I’m mistaken. The humidity is a weight on my shoulders.

But here inside the Rothko chapel, I shudder. The dark walls give me nothing, nothing comes back to me but me. Emptiness. Surrounded by this chapel, these fourteen large canvasses of dark on darker, I still the inner voice. I sit.

I suddenly understand something—what, I can’t say, but it permeates the whole room and myself and even the world.

There are no symbols or myths to contemplate here, only the silence of our inner selves. That’s the chill, that’s the truth, that’s the emptiness.

Rothko committed suicide early in 1970. Some art critic said he explored the difference between light and dark and between calm and agitated surfaces. And in this chapel, he created a spiritual environment, more conducive to discovery than any church I’ve ever been in.

I left the bench finally, went about my regular business, touring, teaching, and when exhaustion or tedium grabs me I take my mind back to that bench, those dark paintings looming out of the half light all around me, and find again what I need.

        Bird vanish from the sky
               the last cloud drains away.
               We sit, the mountain and I,
               until only the mountain remains.
                              ~ LiPo