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Without monsters and gods, art cannot enact a drama.

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
Without
Enact
Monsters
Gods
Drama
Art
Cannot

More quotes by 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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The reason for my painting large canvases is that I want to be intimate and human.
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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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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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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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 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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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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I am here to make you think. . . . I am not here to make pretty pictures!
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'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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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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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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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 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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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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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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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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The abstract artist has given material existence to many unseen worlds and tempi.
Mark Rothko
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There is more power in telling little than in telling all.
Mark Rothko