Director Brian Schnipper is telling us about abstract artist Mark Rothko, the subject of his upcoming play at Ensemble Theatre, “Red.”
“With Rothko’s murals, there’s so many layers and he used very thin paint. You can see the top layer and the second layer and maybe the third, but beyond that— and Rothko said he sometime painted 26 layers. Even art historians say you can’t tell where certain paints start. They can’t understand his techniques. Sometimes he’d burn the canvas with turpentine, they know that, but as to the layers, they don’t know how.”