I use colors that have already been experienced through the light of day and through the state of mind of the total man. In other words, my colors ar… - Mark Rothko

But the most common error among the whole-hearted abstractionists nowadays [in 1946] is to mistake the medium for an end in itself, instead of a means. On the other hand, the surrealists erred in supposing that one can do without a medium, that in attacking the medium one does not destroy just one means for getting into the unknown. Color and space relations constitute such a means because from them can be made structures which exhibit the various patterns of reality.

I hope to paint something that will ruin the appetite of every son of a bitch who ever eats in that room.

[the first ingredient of his work]... is a clear preoccupation with death - intimations of mortality.