Mark Rothko

Mercury sits in mild friction with Mars at eight hundredths of a degree, the tightest contact in this chart. Air takes four of his ten planets, water three, fire two and a single one earth, and five of the ten were retrograde. The chart holds two T-squares, both running through Venus and Pluto, one closing with Uranus and one with Jupiter. The record says Rothko painted large fields of colour meant to be seen close up, objected furiously when they were hung as decoration, and returned a commission for a restaurant rather than let that happen.

The reading for that tightest pairing is thought and drive colliding: arguing for its own sake, impatience with slower thinkers, and saying the true thing in the most damaging available way. The record's own word is furiously, and the most damaging available way to make a point about how paintings are hung is to give back the money, which is what it says he did. At eight hundredths of a degree that is about as close as a chart and a record come to using the same sentence.

Mars sits sixty degrees from Saturn at under nine tenths of a degree, sustained effort: craftsmanship, training, and the rare ability to work at something for years, which in a painter who spent a career on one problem of scale and colour is the duller and more useful contact of the two. A single planet in earth, in a man whose work was physical objects on walls, is the count that cuts against it, and earth in a chart is a temperament rather than a material.

Mercury lies at an awkward angle to Jupiter at three tenths of a degree, scale outrunning accuracy: exaggeration, and confident wrongness delivered well, which in somebody arguing about how his own work should be displayed is a reading the record neither confirms nor refutes. His Moon sits on the twenty sixth degree of Scorpio at noon with Sagittarius still possible, so it is left out. Mercury, Venus, Jupiter, Saturn and Pluto were the five retrograde planets. He died in New York on 25 February 1970, at sixty six. Jupiter stood in easy contact with his natal Neptune at three hundredths of a degree that day, Mercury came back to its own natal degree at under a fifth, and Neptune stood sixty degrees from his natal Sun at under three tenths. The Moon was disseminating and eighty three per cent lit.