How I Fell in Love with a Dead Man at the National Gallery

Before I moved to Singapore in 2021, I made a quiet pilgrimage to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. It wasn’t my first time seeing Mark Rothko—but it was the first time I understood the depth of my devotion to him.

The first encounter was when I was sixteen or seventeen. My parents, ever the self-appointed curators of my cultural upbringing, took me on a road trip from our home in Western Massachusetts to D.C. Museums were our family beach. While other families laid out towels under the sun, we walked marble floors under the weight of oil paintings and the illusion of high society. My parents prided themselves on this: "We don’t waste time sunbathing. We grow." And so I was raised to believe leisure was frivolous, that sand between your toes meant mediocrity. It took me years to unlearn that. These days, I crave the beach like oxygen. But that’s beside the point.

That day in D.C., years ago and again in 2021, I sat in front of Rothko’s massive, aching canvases and felt something I didn't yet have words for. I still don’t, not fully. I just know that I fell in love—with color, with silence, with a man who had been dead since 1970. He lived in every brushstroke. He screamed in every gradient.

I was a girl from Lithuania. He was a boy from Latvia. We were both immigrants to the U.S., both swallowed by our own minds in different times. Rothko once said, "I'm not interested in the relationship of color or form or anything else. I'm interested only in expressing basic human emotions—tragedy, ecstasy, doom, and so on." That quote hit me like a freight train. I was a teenager walking alone through galleries, allowed to roam while my parents kept up appearances. In that solitude, I became theatrical—always dressed up, always hoping someone would see me and save me. Propose, maybe. I was desperate for connection. For escape. I disassociated before I even knew what the word meant.

And then there was Rothko—who wanted his viewers to feel. Not to understand. Not to intellectualize. Just feel. I connected to that. He didn’t give his work explicit meaning because he wanted the meaning to rise up inside you. And it did. In me, it did.

"A painting is not about experience—it is an experience," he once said. And his were. Sitting in front of one was like standing in front of someone’s soul—raw, stripped of language, exposed like a wound. There was something about that vulnerability that mirrored the chaos inside me. My home life, though polished on the outside, was deeply abusive. Rothko’s work gave me sanctuary—a place where darkness didn’t have to be hidden, where melancholy wasn’t shameful.

I used to dream of becoming an oil painter. I still do. But I never had the chance to learn. The images in my head never translated well through my untrained hands, and that disconnect became its own kind of pain. I used to think you had to suffer to be an artist. Maybe I still do. Or maybe Rothko just taught me that there’s dignity in suffering when it's transmuted into something beautiful.

He was my escape route. My unrequited love. My proof that art is the only place where we can meet someone long after they’re gone—and feel like they see us.

If I could, I’d marry Mark Rothko. I’d light candles in front of his canvases and vow myself to the pursuit of sincerity and suffering and all the tender things he dared to show the world. But I can’t marry him. So instead, I write this. And I remember.