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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.

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
Moved
Missing
Interested
Doom
Color
Expressing
Emotion
Ecstasy
Point
Emotions
Bigs
Relationships
Tragedy

More quotes by Mark Rothko

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My art is not abstract, it lives and breathes
Mark Rothko
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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.
Mark Rothko
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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.
Mark Rothko
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We assert that the subject is crucial and only that subject matter is valid which is tragic and timeless.
Mark Rothko
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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.
Mark Rothko
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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.
Mark Rothko
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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.
Mark Rothko
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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.
Mark Rothko
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A painting is not a picture of an experience, but is the experience.
Mark Rothko
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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.
Mark Rothko
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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.
Mark Rothko
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I am here to make you think. . . . I am not here to make pretty pictures!
Mark Rothko
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There is no such thing as good painting about nothing.
Mark Rothko
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The reason for my painting large canvases is that I want to be intimate and human.
Mark Rothko
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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.
Mark Rothko
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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.
Mark Rothko
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Art to me is an anecdote of the spirit.
Mark Rothko
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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.
Mark Rothko
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A picture lives by companionship, expanding and quickening in the eyes of the sensitive observer
Mark Rothko
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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.
Mark Rothko