son

 

maintained a 9-5 schedule

"silence is so accurate"

 

relationship

“You might as well get one thing straight. I'm not an abstractionist... I'm not interested in the relationships of color or form or anything else. I'm interested only in expressing basic human emotions—tragedy, ecstasy, doom and so on. And the fact that a lot of people break down and cry when confronted with my pictures show that I communicate those basic human emotions... The people who weep before my pictures are having the same religious experience I had when I painted them. And if you, as you say, are moved only by their color relationships then you miss the point.”
― Mark Rothko [1903-1970]

inventory

"My motto was 'Buy a picture a day' and I lived up to it."
- Peggy Guggenheim, where only 3% of her collection is exhibited at any one time

anxiety

Learn more about anxiety here.

"What makes a work of art great is ambiguity."
- Eric Kandel

"There's more power in telling little than telling all."
- Mark Rothko

"Great art doesn't let your mind wander - it makes you concentrate."

18 inches

UNTITLED, 1949, oil on canvas

Mark Rothko in response to how close one should stand to his canvases.

infinity

Red, Orange, Tan, and Purple, 1949


With Mark Rothko's paintings, people say that they evoke 'infinity.' Do you see it this way?

My understanding of infinity goes something like this: every 100 years a sparrow flies to the top of a large mountain, and cleans its beak by scraping it on the highest rock. By the time the mountain has been scrapped away to a small pile of dust, that would be the equivalent of the first second of infinity. 
     I thought of that the last time I stood in front of a Rothko and neither felt an overwhelming sense of infinity, nor had a mystical experience of any kind.
     Maybe I've just seen too many Rothkos and they don't pulsate with ethereal splendour for me anymore. Or perhaps I never quite got the wonder of Rothko.


- My Name is Charles Saatchi and I am an Artoholic, p.18

8 of the 15 were manic-depressive*

"Blessed are the cracked for they let the light shine through."

Group portrait of American Abstract Expressionists in 1950, "The Irascibles." From left, rear: Willem de Kooning, Adolph Gottlieb, Ad Reinhardt, Hedda Sterne; (next row) Richard Pousette-Dart, William Baziotes, Jimmy Ernst (w. bow tie), Jackson Pollock (in striped jacket), James Brooks, Clyfford Still (leaning on knee), Robert Motherwell, Bradley Walker Tomlin; (in foreground) Theodoros Stamos (on bench), Barnett Newman (on stool), Mark Rothko (with glasses).

* www.obad.ca