Mark Rothko Quotes

46 quotes in 601 categories

• The people that weep before my paintings are having the same religious experience that I had when I painted it.
• A painting is not a picture of an experience, but is the experience.
• If you are moved only by the color relationships, then you miss the point.
• I am here to make you think. . . . I am not here to make pretty pictures!
• Art to me is an anecdote of the spirit,
• The fact that people break down and cry when confronted with my pictures shows that I can communicate those basic human emotions.. the people who…
• The progression of a painter’s work…will be toward clarity; toward the elimination of all obstacles between the painter and the idea, and between the idea…
• My art is not abstract, it lives and breathes
• There is only one thing I fear in life, my friend: One day, the black will swallow the red.
• It is the poet and philosopher who provide the community of objectives in which the artist participates. Their chief preoccupation, like the artist, is the…
• If you are only moved by color relationships, you are missing the point. I am interested in expressing the big emotions - tragedy, ecstasy, doom.
• 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…
• There is no such thing as good painting about nothing.
• We assert that the subject is crucial and only that subject matter is valid which is tragic and timeless.
• We favor the simple expression of the complex thought. We are for the large shape because it has the impact of the unequivocal. We wish…
• 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…
• The most interesting painting is one that expresses more of what one thinks than of what one sees
• A picture lives by companionship, expanding and quickening in the eyes of the sensitive observer
• This world of the imagination is fancy-free and violently opposed to common sense.
• 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…

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