Quotes from Mark Rothko

There is no such thing as good painting about nothing.

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.

This would be a distortion of their meaning, since the pictures are intimate and intense, and are the opposite of what is decorative; and have been painted in a scale of normal living rather than an institutional scale.

There is more power in telling little than in telling all.

This world of the imagination is fancy-free and violently opposed to common sense.

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

Many of those who are driven to this life are desperately searching for those pockets of silence where we can root and grow.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Silence is so accurate.

That is why we profess a spiritual kinship with primitive and archaic art.

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.

We assert that the subject is crucial and only that subject matter is valid which is tragic and timeless.

I'm not an abstractionist. I'm not interested in the relationship of color or form or anything else. I'm interested only in expressing basic human emotions: tragedy, ecstasy, doom, and so on.

If you are only moved by color relationships, you are missing the point. I am interested in expressing the big emotions - tragedy, ecstasy, doom.

Art to me is an anecdote of the spirit.

Without monsters and gods, art cannot enact a drama.

My art is not abstract, it lives and breathes

It is really a matter of ending this silence and solitude, of breathing and stretching one's arms again.

I would like to say to those who think of my pictures as serene, whether in friendship or mere observation, that I have imprisoned the most utter violence in every inch of their surface.

You've got sadness in you, I've got sadness in me – and my works of art are places where the two sadnesses can meet, and therefore both of us need to feel less sad.

A picture lives by companionship. 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.