Quote

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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Mark Rothko
Age: 66 †
Born: 1903
Born: September 25
Died: 1970
Died: February 25
Artist
Drawer
Painter
University Teacher
Dvinsk
Marcus Rothkowitz
Since
Participation
Way
Novels
Like
Pictures
Drama
Large
Direct
Participates
Novel
Dramas
Small
Renaissance

More quotes by 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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(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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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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There is more power in telling little than in telling all.
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 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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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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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 picture must be... a revelation, an unexpected and unprecedented resolution of an eternally familiar need.
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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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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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 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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A painting is not a picture of an experience, but is the experience.
Mark Rothko
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My art is not abstract, it lives and breathes
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 only one thing I fear in life, my friend: One day, the black will swallow the red.
Mark Rothko
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There is no such thing as good painting about nothing.
Mark Rothko