Mark Rothko Quotes - Page 2

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

The romantics were prompted to seek exotic subjects and to travel to far off places. They failed to realize that, though the transcendental must involve the strange and unfamiliar, not everything strange or unfamiliar is transcendental.

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

If our titles recall the known myths of antiquity, we have used them again because they are the eternal symbols upon which we must fall back to express basic psychological ideas.. ...(they) express something real and existing in ourselves.

With us the disguise must be complete. The familiar identity of things has to be pulverized in order to destroy the finite associations with which our society increasingly enshrouds every aspect of our environment.

I use colors that have already been experienced through the light of day and through the state of mind of the total man. In other words, my colors are not colors that are laboratory tools which are isolated from all accidentals or impurities so that they have a specified identity or purity.

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

I will say without reservations that from my point of view there can be no abstractions. Any shape or area that has not the pulsating concreteness of real flesh and bones, its vulnerability to pleasure or pain is nothing at all. Any picture that does not provide the environment in which the breath of life can be drawn does not interest me.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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 myth holds us, therefore, not through its romantic flavor, not the remembrance of beauty of some bygone age, not through the possibilities of fantasy, but because it expresses to us something real and existing in ourselves, as it was to those who first stumbled upon the symbols to give them life.

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

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 to reassert the picture plane. We are for flat forms because they destroy illusion and reveal truth.

We are concerned with similar states of consciousness and relationship to the world.. ..If previous abstractions paralleled the scientific and objective preoccupations of our times, ours are finding a pictoral equivalent for man's new knowledge and consciousness of his more complex inner self.

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.

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.

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

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

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