Mark Rothko Quotes

It is not your paintings I like, it is your painting.

The reason the art world doesn't respond to Kinkade is because none - not one - of his ideas about subject-matter, surface, color, composition, touch, scale, form, or skill is remotely original. They're all cliche and already told.

Just because someone said painting is dead doesn't mean that it's a fact or the truth - painting is the soul food of art, in a way.

Objective painting is not good painting unless it is good in the abstract sense.

It doesn't make much difference how the paint is put on as long as something has been said. Technique is just a means of arriving at a statement.

In the arts the way in which an idea is rendered, and the manner in which it is expressed, is much more important than the idea itself.

All art is bad, but modern art is the worst.

What is bad painting? Picabia made some deliberately bad paintings, but they were by him, so great in a way.

There is no reason for me to show my collection in New York, because it's not about craft and technique there.

Unfortunately, the Egyptians weren't the greatest artists in the world.

I don't think there's any formula for what makes great art.

Filmmakers are going to make films, just like painters are going to paint.

If the paying public demands naturalistic art, then an artist can use his skills to produce such pictures - but these are to be clearly distinguished from the artist's own art.

One mustn't always believe that feeling is everything. In the arts, it is nothing without form.

The older painting - well, it does have an effect all at once, I suppose, but it's of a lesser intensity than a lot of the American work in the last ten or fifteen years.

Sometimes I think that there's a fine line between impressionistic and messy.

I think that an artist should be a skilled craftsman.

Sane judgment abhors nothing so much as a picture perpetrated with no technical knowledge, although with plenty of care and diligence.

To say of a picture, as is often said in its praise, that it shows great and earnest labour, is to say that it is incomplete and unfit for view.

When art is about craftsmanship, then guys like me don't make it as artists.

When you walk past a painting in a museum, if it doesn't make you feel something, then it's probably a failure.

The writer concerned more with technique than truth becomes a technician, not an artist.

Basically painting is total idiocy.

If the man who paints only the tree, or flower, or other surface he sees before him were an artist, the king of artists would be the photographer. It is for the artist to do something beyond this.

I have never been against new art as such; some of it is good, much is crap, most is somewhere in between.