Machu Picchu (Peru), June 2016

*an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.

If we were speaking from the point of view of the historian, and if we desired to know as concretely as possible how those peoples of the past or present conceived of their world, we should have to turn to their philosophy to find how they thought about their world, and to their sciences to analyze the atomic factors that contributed to those thoughts, and to their applied arts for the understanding of how this notion appeared when necessarily vulgarized to the common denominator of intelligence. But we would have to turn to their art to understand how they “felt about their world,” to know how their notions of reality found expression in their sensual perception of the world. And we know, of course, how those expressions can differ by simply examining Christian art, which consciously discarded the reality of its predecessor, Greek Hellenistic art.

Mark Rothko in The Artist’s Reality: Philosophies of Art

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