Painted blue walls of an abandoned house in remote Montana. Built with the expectations of living a life of promise fueled by precious metals pulled from the earth. Shattered dreams and the patina of misery of the home left behind for new discoveries.
Mark Rothko (born Markus Yakovlevich Rothkowitz,) was an abstract painter best known for his color field paintings that depicted irregular and painterly rectangular regions of color created in the period of 1949 to 1970.
If you get the chance to see the play “Red” on PBS, it’s is excellent.
“Red” is a play by American writer John Logan about artist Mark Rothko first produced by the Donmar Warehouse, London, on December 8, 2009. The original production was directed by Michael Grandage and performed by Alfred Molina as Rothko and Eddie Redmayne as his fictional assistant Ken.
These walls in the ghost town of Bannack, Montana remind me of the Rothko paintings I’ve seen in fine art museums. Large fields of color with variations like these old faded walls of the abandoned house.
Unlike Rothko’s paintings, the patina of age has created the undulating, weathered look on the old walls of this abandoned house from days of the gold rush.
Below is another view of the old Bannack, Montana with a view from one room to the next in this abandoned house. The eerie quietness of a family that just picked up and left when the gold ran out and the townsfolk scattered like roaches when the lights flick on in a walkup Bronx apartment.
Bannack, Montana is now preserved in a state of slow decay as a testament to the hardiness of those who sought a better life through toil and the expectation that luck might someday turn their way.
John White discovered gold on Grasshopper Creek in 1862 and word spread like wildfire despite the lack of Social Media. Almost as soon as it started the town boomed and busted. A year later in 1863, the town reached its peak with 3,000 town residents and 2,000 more people living by the creek.
In 1864, Bannack was named the First Territorial Capital of Montana. By February 1865, many of Bannack’s residents had left to mine at Alder Gulch where the nearby town of Virginia City. Today over 60 buildings remain in the Bannack Ghost Town, so remote they have been preserved in the state park.
Edward Fielding is a New England-based artist living in the Upper Valley Region in the foothills of the White Mountains along the Connecticut River but travels extensively around the USA, Canada, and beyond.
Fielding’s work has appeared in magazines, TV commercials and graced the covers of novels around the world. Edward Fielding’s photography is available for purchase here as well as offered by select fine art retailers. There are also several books of Fielding’s work available on Amazon and rights-managed licensing via Arcangel Images.