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There is only one thing I fear in life, my friend: One day, the black will swallow the red.

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
Black
Thing
Life
Swallow
Red
Friend
Fear

More quotes by 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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There is more power in telling little than in telling all.
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Art to me is an anecdote of the spirit.
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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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There is no such thing as good painting about nothing.
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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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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 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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(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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A picture lives by companionship, expanding and quickening in the eyes of the sensitive observer
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.
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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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The reason for my painting large canvases is that I want to be intimate and human.
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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The picture must be... a revelation, an unexpected and unprecedented resolution of an eternally familiar need.
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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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.
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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Without monsters and gods, art cannot enact a drama.
Mark Rothko