Quote

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.

Mark Rothko

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Mark Rothko
Age: 66 †
Born: 1903
Born: September 25
Died: 1970
Died: February 25
Artist
Drawer
Painter
University Teacher
Dvinsk
Marcus Rothkowitz
Artist
Widely
Doe
Painted
Wells
Painter
Well
Accepted
Matter
Notion
Long
Paint
Essence
Paints
Among
Painters

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(I am) dealing not with the particular anecdote, but rather with the Spirit of Myth, which is generic to all myths at all times.
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The picture must be... a revelation, an unexpected and unprecedented resolution of an eternally familiar need.
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There is only one thing I fear in life, my friend: One day, the black will swallow the red.
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To me art is an adventure into an unknown world, which can be explored only by those willing to take the risk.
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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.
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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.
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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 and the observer…to achieve this clarity is, inevitably, to be understood.
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Without monsters and gods, art cannot enact a drama.
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The reason for my painting large canvases is that I want to be intimate and human.
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Small pictures since the Renaissance are like novels large pictures are like dramas in which one participates in a direct way.
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There is more power in telling little than in telling all.
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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.
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The reason for my painting large canvases is that I want to be intimate and human. To paint a small picture is to place yourself outside your experience, to look upon an experience as a stereopticon view or with a reducing glass. However you paint the larger picture, you are in it. It isn't something you command.
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I am here to make you think. . . . I am not here to make pretty pictures!
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Many of those who are driven to this life are desperately searching for those pockets of silence where we can root and grow.
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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.
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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 weep before my pictures are having the same religious experience I had when painting them. And if you say you are moved only by their color relationships then you miss the point.
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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.
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We assert that the subject is crucial and only that subject matter is valid which is tragic and timeless.
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