Illustration by Alex Deadman-Wylie
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As I was sitting on a bench in front of Mark Rothko’s painting No. 1, White and Red (1962), a young woman sat next to me. A girl, who I assumed was her daughter, bounded in after her, holding a crinkled paper map of the museum.
“This must be really important, or it wouldn’t have its own room,” the girl said.
After a few seconds, they left. She was right, of course – the massive oil-on-canvas painting is important, for reasons that anyone with an art history degree (which I don’t have) could tell you. But why was this painting important to me? That was a question only I could answer, and I’d been trying to for almost a year.
I’d been volunteering at the Art Gallery of Ontario for about a month when my visits with the Rothko started. I was just getting my footing, and though most museum visitors would ask me basic questions such as where to find the nearest washroom or how late the gift shop was open, occasionally someone would ask where to find a specific painting or artist. So I tried to walk the floors to learn where everything was.
The craft project that allowed me to relive my old races
Rothko’s painting was on display for the AGO’s Moments in Modernism exhibition from June, 2024, to this April, and every week, either before my volunteer shift or during it, I’d pop over for a visit. It wasn’t just so I could look at the painting, but so I could be with it. I guess you could say it had a presence. I spent most of my time standing in front of it wondering how some smudgy white, red and greyish-brown rectangles on a black background could have such a profound effect on me.
Over time, my Rothko visits got longer and longer. On many occasions – slower evenings at the gallery or late afternoons on snowy winter days – I was alone in the room with it. I looked forward to this ritual. I could easily stand in front of the painting for 10 minutes without trying. And I paid attention to how I felt after: Lighter, somehow. Like I’d been reset.
I remembered reading about three-hour art observation sessions in Oliver Burkeman’s book Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals. The concept is simple: Choose a painting or sculpture at a museum and look at it for three hours. It’s an assignment that Jennifer Roberts, an art history professor at Harvard University, gives to her students. When Burkeman spoke to her about it for his book, she told him that students “needed someone to give them permission to spend this kind of time on anything.”
This idea of being given permission to slow down for an uncomfortably long time had always stuck with me. I‘d never felt motivated to spend three hours with a painting until I realized that the exhibition I’d been visiting weekly for nearly a year would soon be closing, and my time with Rothko would be coming to an end. So, despite Burkeman’s description of feeling grumpy, fatigued and irritated while looking at his chosen painting for three hours, I decided to do it.
After the first half hour, the constant urge to check my phone went away, and after that, the time just flew by. I stood up close to the painting for a while, then sat on the floor looking up at it. I studied every brushstroke. I observed the painting and its visitors from the leather bench at the back of the room. I listened to their (mixed) opinions, their whispers about how the artist died, their gasps at the painting’s sheer size.
Toward the end of the three hours, a middle-aged man wearing a backpack on his front told me what he believed Rothko was saying with this painting. He saw a sun and a field and seemed quite confident in the narrative he had constructed around that.
“What do you think this painting is about?” he asked.
He looked disappointed when I told him that I don’t think it’s about anything. No hidden meaning, no story. It’s some rectangles that were hand-painted by an artist who lived his whole life before I was born. Those rectangles are alive with such energy that they float above the canvas. Somehow, they make you feel less alone. You feel connected to something that happened before you and that will still be around, and still be important, long after you’re gone. And, despite having no access to Rothko’s thoughts or intention, I understand what he was trying to tell me.
It took me three hours to see his work not just as a painting but as a human experience. One that I now share with the artist, and one that I’d obviously been searching for over the past year.
When I tell people this story, they assume slowing down and only looking at one thing for that long was hard. It wasn’t. The only hard part of looking at a painting for three hours was permitting myself to take the time to do something so entirely unproductive, but I’ll forever be grateful that I did. And I look forward to doing it again.
Florence McCambridge lives in Toronto.