Mark Rothko Quotes

To me art is an adventure into an unknown world, which can be explored only by those willing to take the risk.

There is only one thing I fear in life, my friend: One day, the black will swallow the red.

I'm not an abstractionist. 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.

The most interesting painting is one that expresses more of what one thinks than of what one sees

A painting is not a picture of an experience, but is the experience.

There is more power in telling little than in telling all.

If you are only moved by color relationships, you are missing the point. I am interested in expressing the big emotions - tragedy, ecstasy, doom.

The artist invites the spectator to take a journey within the realm of the canvas... Without taking the journey, the spectator has really missed the essential experience of the picture.

You think my paintings are calm, like windows in some cathedral? You should look again. I'm the most violent of all the American painters. Behind those colours there hides the final cataclysm.

Art to me is an anecdote of the spirit.

Silence is so accurate.

I am here to make you think. . . . I am not here to make pretty pictures!

Art to me is an anecdote of the spirit, and the only means of making concrete the purpose of its varied quickness and stillness.

This world of the imagination is fancy-free and violently opposed to common sense.

If you are moved only by the color relationships, then you miss the point.

It is a widely accepted notion among painters that it does not matter what one paints as long as it is well painted. This is the essence of academicism.

Without monsters and gods, art cannot enact a drama.

While the authority of the doctor or plumber is never questioned, everyone deems himself a good judge and an adequate arbiter of what a work of art should be and how it should be done.

My art is not abstract, it lives and breathes

Look, it's my misery that I have to paint this kind of painting, it's your misery that you have to love it, and the price of the misery is thirteen hundred and fifty dollars.

The abstract artist has given material existence to many unseen worlds and tempi.

There is no such thing as good painting about nothing.

Many of those who are driven to this life are desperately searching for those pockets of silence where we can root and grow.

I don't express myself in my paintings. I express my not-self.

The picture must be... a revelation, an unexpected and unprecedented resolution of an eternally familiar need.

I'm interested only in expressing basic human emotions. And the fact that a lot of people break down and cry when confronted with my pictures shows that I can communicate these basic human emotions.

Pictures must be miraculous: the instant one is completed, the intimacy between the creation and the creator is ended.

(I am) dealing not with the particular anecdote, but rather with the Spirit of Myth, which is generic to all myths at all times.

A picture lives by companionship, expanding and quickening in the eyes of the sensitive observer

The reason for my painting large canvases is that I want to be intimate and human.

It is really a matter of ending this silence and solitude, of breathing and stretching one's arms again.

Small pictures since the Renaissance are like novels; large pictures are like dramas in which one participates in a direct way.

I'm not an abstractionist... I'm not interested in relationships of colour or form or anything else.

I also hang the pictures low rather than high, and particularly in the case of the largest ones, often as close to the floor as is feasible, for that is the way they are painted.

The people that weep before my paintings are having the same religious experience that I had when I painted it.

We assert that the subject is crucial and only that subject matter is valid which is tragic and timeless.

And last, it may be worthwhile trying to hang something beyond the partial wall because some of the pictures do very well in a confined space.

A picture lives by companionship. It dies by the same token. It is therefore risky to send it out into the world. How often it must be impaired by the eyes of the unfeeling.

You’ve got sadness in you, I’ve got sadness in me – and my works of art are places where the two sadnesses can meet, and therefore both of us need to feel less sad.

I would like to say to those who think of my pictures as serene, whether in friendship or mere observation, that I have imprisoned the most utter violence in every inch of their surface.