Part I
Sitting down with SLAC Scenic Artists Melanie Borgenicht and Josie Fife to discuss reproducing Rothko and RED.
MELANIE BORGENICHT. It's interesting to watch the film [Rothko's Rooms]. You can't walk away from that documentary without feeling like you're in Rothko's brain. And really all I've thought since I started painting is how everybody says, "My kindergartener could do that." I start painting them, and it's like, "Not really." Because they're complicated... you can get a sense of all the layering and depth – even from the books. You can't fake that. You have to do it.
JOSIE FIFE. Absolutely. I remember Rothko from Art History in college. They'd show these giant slides – his paintings were large. I've only ever seen one in the Cincinnati Art Museum, but I was struck by all tonalities, the saturated color, the layers and blending. I just lay in bed last night thinking of carving shapes with a brush.
MEL. Me, too!
JOSIE. But then I dreamed I was painting these giant hip bones that were 20 feet tall.
MEL. I was just laying there going over and over in my mind – "I could do it like this, or I could do it like this..." But whenever there's something sort of complicated, I always do that – and then I feel like the next day, I come back, and I've done one – because I did it while I was staring at the ceiling. Usually we're imitating bricks and signs – it's not very often in theatre that we're replicating someone else's work on such a huge scale.
SLAC. How many paintings are you doing?
MEL. There are four 6x6 paintings that we need to complete and a fifth that is a few steps into the process.
SLAC. So what's the difference in the experience – Rothko vs bricks?
JOSIE. This is a lot more fun! It's really exciting.
MEL. It's fun to keep going back to the book. As an artist, I feel like I see something different every time I go back. I think as artists, you can almost get carried away in your own vision – I've gotten off track a couple of times and suddenly realized that's not really something [Rothko] would do.
JOSIE. Yeah, I've had to stop myself and go back to the book.
MEL. You have to have self-control – because you want to take it over – because the concept of the abstract "fuzzy rectangles" is so cool. You kind of get your own mojo going on, and then it's...
JOSIE. (Laughing) I thought that was just me.
MEL. That's really funny. I thought it was just me. Plus, I know Rothko's work, too, so it's so cool to do – and it's not something I would build a 6x6 canvas in my garage and try to do...
SLAC. The scale of the work is so interesting.
JOSIE. Now that I'm doing it, it makes me think I want to more of this in my own time...
MEL. I know, me, too... here we're on the clock – and I could spend hours. Every time I turn around I want to add something. That's what's weird about this – there is a deadline. You can't spend your whole day putting little blue lines on something because there are handrails that need to painted, or bricks – all the boring stuff still has to happen. It's just such a cool concept that once you start, you just want to keep going.
JOSIE. I'd love to do this for the next six months... And we have today, maybe tomorrow.
MEL. (Laughing) "Okay, we need to reproduce four Rothko's by four o'clock. One per hour."
SLAC. (Laughing) Rothko would be so proud.
MEL. I'm sure. He'd think, "Oh, God. You guys are crazy," but it's so much fun. And it's great that Keven has given us so much freedom to just go. It is what it is, so you just go with it.
JOSIE. He certainly didn't try to micromanage us – there was no "...first, you steam the canvas, and then..."
SLAC. Could you speak about how you did prep the canvases or how you are trying to reproduce Rothko's techniques?
JOSIE. I'm starting with a dark stain – most of his colors are pretty dark, then layering on top of that and sort of mixing the colors on the canvas – brighter colors -- but then when you mix them on the canvas they retain some of that, but they also blend together and give other tones and hues.
SLAC. Are you watering the paints down quite a bit or is it quite dense color?
JOSIE. I am watering it down quite a bit, but the more layers I put on, the heavier that I put it on if that makes sense. So I start with a stain and then get heavier and heavier as I work outward.
SLAC. They talk about that in Rothko's Rooms – that they would start out light, but then his paintings would take on such a weight, a thickness like a skin – from the description, I kept imagining the surface like elephant hide.
MEL. I wonder what the texture is... When I went to the Museum of Modern Art in New York, there was a Van Gogh exhibit – I just about lost my mind – some of his paint was inches of the canvas. I wonder what the texture of the Rothko's is... Could you tell?
JOSIE. I couldn't really tell. My sense is that it was thicker than you might think it was. On some of them, you can see the scrubbing that he did, and those look really thin where you can see the marks – the thicker it gets, the more that gets hidden unless it's lit from the side or something then you can see the texture. It's impossible to tell from a picture in a book. You have to see the real thing.
SLAC. It's amazing you're reproducing so much from a book.
JOSIE. It's tricky to reproduce the real textures of his work looking at a slide or a photograph in a book.
MEL. Plus we have to fake what would be months of labor very quickly. I just go to the bathroom, come back, and "Oh, I'm going to put another coat of that on there..." We're faking the build up of weeks and months.
JOSIE. We don't have that much dry time.
MEL. We have fans. Hurry, hurry! But it's fun. It's fun being in the space, how we used the actual theatre. There's something different about this one. I've worked here for so long, and there's just a different feeling about this play. Maybe it's the art. Maybe it's the way the whole stage is set up like a studio. We don't have to worry about dripping paint on the floor... I think that's what makes it more fun – we get to be messy. Artistic.
SLAC. And you talked about the light – natural light – with these particular paintings, which also comes up in the play.
MEL. Rothko hated natural light. I can't imagine what he painted by.
We were working the other day – it was about two o'clock – and sunlight was just blasting in the two windows. There was a horrible glare.
JOSIE. You couldn't see what you were doing at all. She had to turn the canvas around so she was in the dark and could actually see.
MEL. I wonder if he just painted in the dark. Josh Martin was making fun of me for hating natural light, too.
SLAC. Working in the dark actually allowing you to see reminds me of how Rothko talks about Caravaggio's commission of The Conversion of St. Paul in RED – how it's location [in the Santa Maria del Popolo church] was so dark, the painting had to be internally luminous. To be seen.
MEL. Yeah... I couldn't see the work with the light right on. It was kind of wild. We'll see how it turns out.
SLAC. I look forward to seeing your post-Rothko art work.
MEL. We should get something going on with this, Josie.
SLAC. You should.
JOSIE. I'd love it.
MEL. We can set up in my garage.
SLAC. Suddenly your scale will be 10 foot x 10 foot... What do you like doing in your work? Medium or subject?
JOSIE. Acrylic, watercolor, oils... I love to do the figure. I've sort of gravitated to watercolor because I've had three shoulder surgeries, so it's easier to work down here. But I've invented a little easel for oils that sits low so I don't have to reach up as much.
SLAC. How is it working with the demands of painting the Rothko's?
JOSIE. I use my whole body. It's like Feldenkreis work. For some reason, the little micro movements are more difficult than painting whole walls.
MEL. It's very physical to cover the volume of the canvas – it's wide, so you have to move pretty fast before it dries.
JOSIE. It's fun to flip them, too, like he did.
MEL. I didn't do that. (Moment of silence. Laughter.) It will be interesting to see if they look similar to one another. We're each doing two, so hopefully it will look like the same person did them.
JOSIE. Maybe we should trade places.
MEL. Maybe we should. Swap back and forth.
SLAC. That's interesting – so intuiting what you can about his painting process – you have to just make the decision and go –
MEL. Pretty much. And you keep it wet.
JOSIE. And there's such a time constraint – you just have to get it done. If there's time later, go back for more nuances. There probably won't be.
MEL. That's our job – the shorthand of the art. How can you do it and make it look similar in the least amount of time.
SLAC. I loved your clouds for HOW I BECAME A PIRATE. In terms of reproducing someone's work, in that case Illustrator David Shannon, that was amazing.
MEL. Thanks. It's a lot easier to recreate kid's books.
SLAC. But the backgrounds in that book really do look and feel like paintings, and you captured that.
MEL. I love the kid's shows. It's so much easier than this kind of thing. Probably because it's not as layered or deep – there's not a huge amount of interpretation. You just do what they did. Fast. Like everything else.
SLAC. So what's next after the Rothko's?
MEL. Making it look like a painter's studio, aging... We kind of get into that more as we get closer to the opening. They are putting in a functional slop sink. Looking in all the books, Rothko's studio wasn't very trashed – he had a table that was full of paint jars and what he worked with, but the rest of it was bare and fairly clean.
SLAC. It's interesting looking at photographs of [Jackson] Pollock in his studio and there's paint everywhere – versus Rothko's spare studio with its pulley system --
MEL. Yes, Pollock worked on the floor.
JOSIE. He worked from bridges, too.
MEL. That must have been a huge mess. I'm glad we're not doing him. (Laughter)
JOSIE. This is a lot more fun, too, than Pollock.
SLAC. Why do you say that? That's really interesting – and feels connected to conversations within the play.
JOSIE. I think Pollock was sort of in the right place at the right time. Once he did what he did, he was trapped by and couldn't do anything else. I think that was a very sad thing for him – when he tried to move on, no one would buy his work. So what do you do for the rest of your life? Rothko's work is so much more interesting to me. I did another show where I had to replicate a bunch of Van Gogh's, which was really great. It's really fun work.
MEL. Are you going to start doing abstracts now?
JOSIE. Yeah. I'm going to start painting giant hip bones. (Laughter)
SLAC. I can't wait to see that.
MEL. Where did that come from?
JOSIE. Well, I've been doing Feldenkreis. If you're more aware of your bones, your skeletal structure, your hip bones as you're moving, you're less likely to injure yourself. My practitioner is always saying to be aware of your hip bones and know where they are. So it's been on my mind. Plus, my practitioner has hip bones in her office –
SLAC. They're really beautiful bones.
JOSIE. They are, they look very sculptural.
SLAC (to MEL) What do you paint when you go home?
MEL. People ask me that all the time – I have before... now I just want to get so far away from paint, I don't really paint when I go home.
SLAC. Well, I can't wait to see all of your Rothko's! Thank you both so much.
More to come...
