Explore Quotes by Mark Rothko

Art to me is an anecdote of the spirit.

My art is not abstract, it lives and breathes

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

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.

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 expression in concrete form of their notions of reality. Like him, they deal with the verities of time and space, life and death, and the heights of exaltation as well as the depths of despair. The preoccupation with these eternal problems creates a common ground which transcends the disparity in the means used to achieve them.

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.

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

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

There is no such thing as good painting about nothing.

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

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

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

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

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