Quote

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.

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
Eye
Expanding
Quickening
Lives
Cruelty
Token
Often
Send
Impotent
Must
Sensitive
Tokens
World
Picture
Risky
Therefore
Observer
Eyes
Companionship
Impaired
Dies
Observers
Unfeeling

More quotes by Mark Rothko

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The reason for my painting large canvases is that I want to be intimate and human.
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Without monsters and gods, art cannot enact a drama.
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If you are only moved by color relationships, you are missing the point. I am interested in expressing the big emotions - tragedy, ecstasy, doom.
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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.
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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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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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The abstract artist has given material existence to many unseen worlds and tempi.
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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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Art to me is an anecdote of the spirit, and the only means of making concrete the purpose of its varied quickness and stillness.
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There is more power in telling little than in telling all.
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My art is not abstract, it lives and breathes
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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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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 picture must be... a revelation, an unexpected and unprecedented resolution of an eternally familiar need.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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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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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