Rothko Quotes

“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.”

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

“The SleepingI have imagined all this:In 1940 my parents were in loveAnd living in the loft on West 10thAbove Mark Rothko who painted cabbage rosesOn their bedroom walls the night they got married.I can guess why he did it.My mother’s hair was the color of yellow applesAnd she wore a velvet hat with her pajamas.I was not born yet. I was remote as starlight.It is hard for me to imagine thatMy parents made love in a roomful of rosesAnd I wasn’t there.But now I am. My mother is blushing.This is the wonderful thing about art.It can bring back the dead. It can wake the sleepingAs it might have late that nightWhen my father and mother made love above RothkoWho lay in the dark thinking Roses, Roses, Roses.”

“His room was a sickly dual-tone of crimson and charcoal, like an Untitled Rothko, the colours bleeding into each other horribly and then rather serenely. The overall effect was overwhelmingly unapologetic but it grew on you like a wart on your nose you didn't realise it was a part of your identity until one day it simply was. His room was his identity. Fiercely bold, avant-garde but never monotonous. He was red, he was black, he was bored, and he was fire. At least to me he seemed like fire. A tornado of fire that burned all in its wake leaving only the wretched brightness of annihilation. His room was where he charmed and disarmed us. We were his playthings. Nobody plays with fire and leaves unscarred. The fire soon seeps into chard and soot. The colours of his soul, his aura, and probably his heart if he didn't stop smoking.”

“But nobody is visually naive any longer. We are cluttered with images, and only abstract art can bring us to the threshold of the divine.”

“Art to me is an anecdote of the spirit, and the only means of making concrete the purpose of its varied quickness and stillness.”

“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.”

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

“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.”