Mark Rothko, an American abstract painter best known for his "color field" paintings, said something like, "We worked for years to get rid of all that," upon viewing Jasper John's flags. He didn't mind so much that his "kind of art" was being eclipsed by another movement. After all, he had evolved from impressionism in his nature paintings and urban scenes to surrealism and then mythological symbolism, culminating in pure abstractionism based on rectangular patches of color. Still, he detested that pop art seemed to him to be shallow. Instead, he intended to create paintings purified to some essence that unlocked deep primal emotions and spiritual feelings in the viewer. Rothko dies at age 66 from suicide.
"rothko is over that now" is a tribute to his artistic integrity that allowed him to dialectically move from one type of creation to another, searching for more authentic expressions, even if it required a repudiation of his former work. The background of the painting is an allusion to his "Black on Gray" (1970). Rothko, in this work, is a much older man than he ever became, and his "Black and Gray" lies on its side like it has been felled. His clothes are partly shredded by time.
In a partly tongue-in-cheek 1958 speech to the Pratt Institute regarding the secret ingredients of the trade, he cataloged a preoccupation with death, conflict, irony, hope, wit, and play as some essentials. Skyler's work dependably follows this prescription.
