By Jasmine Kim

I was fifteen and wore pinstripe skinny jeans and my arms were decked out in bead bracelets. My nails were painted black and I had red streaks in my hair that swooped over my eye if I straightened it just right. I thought screamo was a legitimate and acceptable genre of music and my parents just didn’t “get me.” I questioned anything and everything about my life, and Angst was my middle name.

I was fifteen when I had my first spiritual experience. I’m not going to tell you about a time I had a dream and Jesus told me to follow him and I’m not going to tell you about a time my pastor spoke in tongues and made me see the angel Gabriel or anything, because it wasn’t like that. It was just me and a chapel, the Rothko Chapel to be exact. My first and only spiritual experience consisted of me just looking at a black canvas, and it was the heaviest thing I’ve ever experienced in my life.

There’s been this air of skepticism around modern art, questioning how it could be considered art at all. My dad was a classical painter at the time, so I was one of those people that looked at minimal paintings and thought to myself “I can totally do that.” So I didn’t really understand at the time why these people dedicated an entire building to this Rothko guy, and why they called it a chapel.

Wasn’t a chapel supposed to be a religious building? How are these black canvases supposed to be even closely related to any spiritual entity or experience? What if this was actually hedonistic or something?

I didn’t understand the building’s location either. Why reside in the middle of a suburb where cats sunbathed on the sidewalk and old people did morning exercises nearby? Is this place geared towards the elderly? Entrance was free and maybe fifteen people were inside, so how was this place even being supported at all?

It turns out that the Rothko Chapel was founded by a cute Houstonian philanthropist couple named John and Domonique de Menil in 1971 who wanted to dedicate this space to people as a place to meditate. An intimate sanctuary available to all people of every belief yet owned by none, the Chapel provides a spiritual experience through Rothko’s work.

Rothko lived during the Second World War when hate and fear was a common theme, and so he found a strange peace with tragedy and sadness and found that the meaning of life was filled with much uncertainty. He even stated once during an interview that “the exhilarated tragic experience is for me the only source of art.” As a result, he was fascinated by primitive religion and named mythology and the unconscious mind as forms of inspiration for most of his work. Rothko was a leader of the new American post-war movement and became a religious leader of a secular age, giving his audience a space to daydream.

Organic and emotional, Rothko’s works were mainly nonobjective and expressionistic. He considered himself as a mystic and aimed to eliminate all pigment and canvas and just suspend clouds of color in the air. Rothko stated once in an interview with a critic “I’m not interested in the relationship of color or form or anything else; I’m interested only in expressing basic human emotions.” The colors were murky hazy, conveying rawness and maintaining the social revolutionary ideas of his youth.

This serious energy of abstract expression was ultimately his response to the terrors of the perils of war, the Holocaust and the start of the Atomic Age. He wanted to create a secular icon for a nonreligious age by banishing all references to nature and bring focus to the concepts of infinite space and timelessness.

In terms of the his work and how I feel about it, I think the universal message that Rothko tries to portray through all of his pieces is to accept this open invitation to feel what Rothko felt. When considering the chapel, I think Rothko and the philanthropist couple are trying to encourage the idea of self-discovery and self-knowledge, and attempting to really understand yourself and who you are. In this sense, I think through this series of black canvases Rothko ultimately is trying to not just portray the relationship between light and dark, but light and dark at the center of our human psyche. While reaching our human psyche, the pieces can reveal some sort of raw and un-pretty vision of what religion and humanity really is.

My dad brought us to this secret sanctuary not only because he loved Rothko, but because he wanted to interact with Rothko’s pieces and understand his sad story as well. As an artist that has yet to make it big, he often took our family on small journeys for sources of inspiration and to encourage us to open up on the spectrum of arts and culture.

Of course, at the ripe age of fifteen I didn’t know any of this, and I was more annoyed than anything to have to be at this small chapel with my parents at my side. It didn’t help that the docents of the chapel were old white ladies with their red framed glasses halfway down their noses and lips pursed ready to say “shhh” once we were ready to mutter a word. They handed us pamphlets with their clammy fingers and we walked into the silence.

There were maybe twenty people total in the entire room and all we could hear was the bustle of people situating themselves in front of canvases. Wooden black pews were all around the room and black cushions littered the cold floor, and people were scattered all around with eyebrows furrowed. I spotted a girl that looked just a little bit older than me decked out in weird hippie tribal print sitting cross-legged on the floor with her eyes closed and I assumed she was meditating or praying.

At this point, instead of looking like the typical Asian family of tourists, my parents and I split up to do our own self-reflecting. Still not 100 percent certain on how I was supposed to blend in, I quietly made my way over to a canvas that no one sitting in front of and popped a squat. I wasn’t sure how long I was supposed to stay in this weirdly cold and eerie place, but I wasn’t an uncultured swine and wasn’t going to whine about it. I silenced my phone, took a deep breath and just took in the vast blackness that was in front of me.

To be honest, I wasn’t sure where to even start looking with my eyes because there was just so much black. After a while I could feel my eyes start to dilate and get fuzzy because it wasn’t used to focusing on all this nothingness, and my sense of time and space was getting blurry. The blackness was calming in a weird way, and the fact that I was sitting alone made me feel utterly vulnerable.

At some point where I had felt like I had been sitting and spacing out for a while, my heartbeat had slowed and my body felt heavy. Everything and everyone around me disappeared and it was just me and Rothko in the universe. I felt as though I could sense every cell in my body and was personally directing where each cell needed to go, and I encountered this ultimate blankness. I didn’t feel like I was inside my own body, and then my hands that were in my lap were starting to get wet. I was crying.

I don’t know why, but once I realized I was crying I just started sobbing harder. I felt so exposed like everyone could see under my skin and I didn’t know if I liked that feeling. I didn’t know much of anything at that point. I felt like I didn’t know who I was anymore and I wanted to know where God was and why the world was turning into such shit and why I felt so alone all the time. I felt like I was unraveling, and I had no control over how fast it was happening.

I felt like I had just met Rothko and heard his whole tragic story. I understood the fear he faced during the Second World War and the hurt he felt when critics didn’t like his art and the sorrow he dealt with when he sliced open the insides of his forearms in his New York studio. I understood all of it.

Not sure what this feeling was I almost started to panic. I started to feel my senses again as if my body was rebooting itself. My legs were definitely asleep at this point and my fingers were cold, so I began to clench my fists and dig my nails into my palms to regain the energy that was drained out of me from this weird experience.

Once I was able to pull myself together and wipe the tears from my eyes I abruptly stood up and walked out of the room, legs still wobbly and shoulders hunched over in a sort of recovery. I walked outside to breathe without the thick solemn air that filled the chapel room and I tried to grasp what had happened to me while sitting there. It’s not like I saw some crazy image in the all the blackness or anything, I just seemed to focus inward and truly meditate on my own being.

At this point I began to understand how Rothko’s work was aimed to portray a raw experience rather than just being pleasing to the eye. All of the different layers and degrees of the blackness of his work sucked me in and abandoned me to float around in this infinite void of nothingness all alone. Experiencing the pieces brought about questions of existence and whether or not there really was a God or even any hope left in the world that we live in.

The Rothko Chapel is a dark baptism or immersion that creates a psychological and spiritual understanding between the artist and the viewer while keeping the eyes in a constant disoriented state. It probed my unconscious mind without me even knowing, and it was an experience that’s hard to put into words.

Even though I was a skeptic moments before walking into this chapel, I now understood after that experience how Rothko’s work and the chapel itself is this ultimate representation of our inner selves in times of hardship, in that he has this way of digging deep inside the viewer and pulling all the grossness out and laying it all on the floor for you to look at.

He didn’t only succeed in exposing himself and his vulnerability, but he also created a psychological journey and a voyage into the unknown with each of these black pieces. He saw beyond artistic ability and instead reveals that everyone, including himself, is hurting. I think he wants to relay the message that sometimes, not everything is going to be okay but that sometimes life just isn’t that great. Because of this rawness, I now find his work forever maddening and alluring, and I think it will always bring people together in the simplest yet most tragic way.

Every time I go to Houston I always try to make time for a little meditation at the Rothko Chapel because I find it peaceful now. I seek the purification and focus it brings about, and find the vast blackness of the collection of canvases intriguing. Every time I go I experience something new, but never as intense as what I experienced the first time around.