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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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Mark Rothko
Age: 66 †
Born: 1903
Born: September 25
Died: 1970
Died: February 25
Artist
Drawer
Painter
University Teacher
Dvinsk
Marcus Rothkowitz
Human
Emotion
Miss
Humans
Break
Communicate
People
Religious
Relationships
Point
Cry
Confronted
Fact
Moved
Weep
Experience
Missing
Pictures
Facts
Painting
Emotions
Shows
Color
Basic

More quotes by 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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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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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.
Mark Rothko
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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.
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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There is more power in telling little than in telling all.
Mark Rothko
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The abstract artist has given material existence to many unseen worlds and tempi.
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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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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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.
Mark Rothko
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My art is not abstract, it lives and breathes
Mark Rothko
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Art to me is an anecdote of the spirit.
Mark Rothko
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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.
Mark Rothko
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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.
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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Without monsters and gods, art cannot enact a drama.
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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A painting is not a picture of an experience, but is the experience.
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
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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