There’s a reason standing in front of a Rothko can feel uncannily like standing in certain weather.
The bleeding color fields, the luminous haze, he was painting emotional states long before anyone thought to call them data.
Finnish designer Joonas Virtanen noticed the connection and followed it to its end. Current Rothko is a weather app that matches your current conditions to one of 89 Rothko paintings.
Enter your location, and instead of icons and percentages, you get a canvas — one that tells you not what the weather is, but what it feels like.
“Weather is data, but it’s also a shared experience,” Virtanen says. “And those two things rarely look alike.”
The matching engine pulls temperature, cloud cover, rain, fog, time of day, and sun position, distilling it into a “mood register” scored against each painting. A grey morning surfaces the deep blues and purples of the Rothko Chapel series.
A sharp afternoon lands near his luminous 1950 No. 5/No. 22, all yellow warmth. The real challenge, Virtanen says, was making the matches feel emotionally right rather than just algorithmically correct.
Colour, doing the same job on a wall
Two prints that work on the principle the app is built on.
The project doesn’t use art as decoration for data. It proposes that art might simply be better at communicating certain truths than a number ever could.
That the emotional reality of a November morning might live more honestly in a Rothko than in any forecast.
See your weather at current-rothko.wabi.ai.
