Mark Rothko

We're not making art, we're making nervous energy.

Art is the concrete representation of our most subconscious capacity to experience the world.

The romantics were prompted by their love for the sublime to seek the unfamiliar and the strange, and to be thrilled by it.

I don't want any white; I don't want any white in my house.

The picture must be filled with drama.

I am an American painter, and my own culture is the one I respond to most deeply.

Those who are artists in our time are the spiritual descendants of the religious painters of the Middle Ages.

The fact that people break down and cry when confronted with my pictures shows that I communicate those basic human emotions.

I want to create a world in which there is validity.

Painting is not about ideas. The idea of the painting is the painting itself.

My art is not abstract; it is a representation of the human spirit.

The older I grow, the more I find meaning in the Bible.

I am not abstract, I am not representational. I am emotional.

To me, the medium is the message.

I refuse to be an intellectual artist.

The drama is in the spectator's mind.

I paint large because I want to be intimate and direct.

Art to me is an anecdote of the spirit.

We are dealing with the essence of human experience.

My pictures are not abstract; they are about life.