Thread by @rebeca6169

"A painting is not a picture of an experience, but is the experience."

~ Mark Rothko 🔴 #BOTD 1903

Mark Rothko (born Markus Yakovlevich Rothkowitz, September 25, 1903 – February 25, 1970), was an American painter of Latvian Jewish descent. Rothko did not personally subscribe to any art movement, but he is generally identified as an abstract expressionist.

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

"To me art is an adventure into an unknown world, which can be explored only by those willing to take the risk."
~ Mark Rothko

"The most interesting painting is one that expresses more of what one thinks than of what one sees"
~ Mark Rothko

"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."
~ Mark Rothko

"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

"There is more power in telling little than in telling all."
~ Mark Rothko

"You think my paintings are calm, like windows in some cathedral? You should look again. I'm the most violent of all the American painters. Behind those colours there hides the final cataclysm."
~ Mark Rothko

"I am here to make you think...I am not here to make pretty pictures!"
~ Mark Rothko

"Art to me is an anecdote of the spirit."
~ Mark Rothko

"When I was a younger man, art was a lonely thing...Today it is not quite the same. But I do know, that many of those who are driven to this life are desperately searching for those pockets of silence where we can root and grow. We must all hope we find them."
~ Mark Rothko

"Silence is so accurate."
~ Mark Rothko

"The artist invites the spectator to take a journey within the realm of the canvas...Without taking the journey, the spectator has really missed the essential experience of the picture."
~ Mark Rothko

"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...However you paint the larger picture, you are in it. It isn't something you command."
~ Mark Rothko

"My art is not abstract, it lives and breathes"
~ Mark Rothko

"The people that weep before my paintings are having the same religious experience that I had when I painted it."
~ Mark Rothko

"I don't express myself in my paintings. I express my not-self."
~ Mark Rothko

"There is no such thing as good painting about nothing."
~ Mark Rothko

"It is the poet and philosopher who provide the community of objectives in which the artist participates...Like him, they deal with the varieties of time and space, life and death, and the heights of exaltation as well as the depths of despair..."
~ Mark Rothko

"I do not believe that there was ever a question of being abstract or representational. It is really a matter of ending this silence and solitude, of breathing, and stretching one's arms again transcendental experiences became possible."
~ Mark Rothko

"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." Rothko

"The picture must be...a revelation, an unexpected and unprecedented resolution of an eternally familiar need."
~ Mark Rothko

"I use colors that have already been experienced through the light of day and through the state of mind of the total man...my colors are not colors that are laboratory tools which are isolated from all accidentals or impurities so that they have a specified identity or purity."

"The myth holds us, therefore, not through its romantic flavor, not the remembrance of beauty of some bygone age...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

Rothko Chapel in Houston, Texas

“On February 25, 1970, Oliver Steindecker, Rothko's assistant, found the artist lying dead on the kitchen floor in front of the sink, covered in blood. He had overdosed on barbiturates and cut an artery in his right arm with a razor blade.There was no suicide note. He was 66.”