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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
Red
Friend
Fear
Black
Thing
Life
Swallow

More quotes by 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.
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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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There is more power in telling little than in telling all.
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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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The picture must be... a revelation, an unexpected and unprecedented resolution of an eternally familiar need.
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Without monsters and gods, art cannot enact a drama.
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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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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.
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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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A picture lives by companionship, expanding and quickening in the eyes of the sensitive observer
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Art to me is an anecdote of the spirit.
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I am here to make you think. . . . I am not here to make pretty pictures!
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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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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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A painting is not a picture of an experience, but is the experience.
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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.
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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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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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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