Michael Craig-Martin Quotes

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  • Artist
  • born 1941
  • 75 quotes

Michael Craig-Martin, an artist (born 1941), is quoted 75 times on QuoteForever. The subjects that come up most often are Art, Thinking, Trying and Exhibitions.

Quotes with a ready-made image come first, then the rest in order of how often they are read and shared. Open any quote to copy it, share it, or turn it into a picture quote.

My great grandmother was Chinese .

Art is more to do with observation than invention.

The art world, of all worlds, has room for everyone.

You can't force yourself to be something you are not.

All the basic information should be in the object itself.

The viewer brings all additional information to the image.

You can't honour someone by copying them or trying to be exactly like them.

I greatly admired him as a teacher I didn't teach the same way as Josef Albers at all.

For many years I hoped to have an exhibition in China, because of my family connection.

In my early work I didn't use much colour. I had no confidence about how I could do this.

The person you admire was true to himself. You can only truly honour him by being true to yourself.

I thought the objects we value least because they were ubiquitous were actually the most extraordinary.

When I told people that I was going to paint the big room magenta, many people thought that I was crazy.

I am trying to present objects in the simplest way possible, and I don't want to supply too much context.

I think that cultural influence is very deep, it is not on the surface and this is true in every culture.

As an artist you are free to use any image, any style, any idea from any culture and any period of history.

It is very important to develop the thing that you are naturally good at, that you are truly interested in.

Usually people start with painting and then go on to make installations; my painting came from installation.

I think the best approach is not to be too much like the thing that they are referring to, see it as a guide.

If you close the door to the things you feel comfortable with, you will never discover the truth about yourself.

In a sense [Joseph] Albers was an authoritarian teacher. He had rules about most things and very definite ideas.

It's important for me to give each thing the possibility to speak and also to allow artworks speak to each other.

I think from an artist's point of view, everything in art, in fact everything in the world is available as material.

When I look at the objects that I draw, it seems to me so obvious about the contemporary world - these are our world.

If you try to copy something exactly you won't get it correct, because you don't share the same tradition and context.

In Britain the power of authority was weakened. There was much more individual freedom and there was great academic freedom.

Sometimes we look at a work of art and we immediately think that it is German art, but with some we don't, it's not so obvious.

It's just that some things more important for this and less important for that, and this is true regardless the style of the art.

'Understanding' art is like having a sense of humour - if you don't have one, no amount of explanation is going to make you laugh.

I am personally happy for artists to make as much money as they can while they can to carry them through the times when they can't.

Often people do not properly value things that they are good at naturally because they find them too easy. That is very problematic.

In the period of '60s to the '90s, British art schools were small, and the number of student was small. The personal contact was great.

Usually when I go to the Summer Exhibition, I think every room is too much the same, and I loose my capacity to look at individual works.

When I started teaching in the late 60s, in a time of student revolutions and changes, they changed in question of society and authority.

Whatever happens to the art world, art will go on regardless. As for obscurity, it looms just over the horizon beckoning us all. Why worry.

I had my exhibition of paintings first in Shanghai, and then recently in Wuhan. Wuhan particularly interested me, because I am 1/8 Chinese.

I came to painting through sculpture, to images through objects. I think that images sit in the middle, somewhere between objects and words.

If I did not love the things that I do, how could I spend my life doing this? You have to invest what you spend your life doing with pleasure.

I do think I paid a price as an artist, and I am trying to make up for it now - I work six days a week in the studio, and I've never been happier.

At the Summer Exhibition, I didn't really change anything; it's the same exhibition. All I changed is the presentation. I didn't really change the rules.

I try to make images that have the immediate presence we take for granted in objects - a chair, a shoe, a book, a Judd - and compose them like sentences.

My idea for every exhibition is we should be able to see every individual work without being distracted by the others, and it doesn't matter if it's quite crowded.

You can see in my paintings, I've taken away the context, I've taken away the shadows, I've taken away expression, I've taken away the personal, and yet so much remains!

I have never understood, for instance, why some people see contemporary art as divided between 'painting' and 'conceptual art', as though this represented a genuine division.

If you were really interested in being creative in teaching, it was possible to try new methods and that was really what we did in Goldsmiths - we used the freedom of the time.

If things are too similar, the dialogue is not very interesting. If you put in contrast, big and small, abstract and representational, you set up the possibility of a discourse.

When I go to China I see many artists whose work reflects on aspects of contemporary popular culture but obviously the history of Western art is not part of their own tradition.

I've taken away everything I could think of, and yet what remains is enough. These days many more people come to my work, and once they see my work they will always recognize it.

You can take things from the past, from the culture, from the immediate past and things that have not yet entered the culture, so they have no history yet. You can create your own context.

I would never put a sculpture in front of a painting, so that it is difficult to see the painting. I always place each thing so you can see it isolated. You can focus on every individual work.

Michael Craig-Martin is quoted on

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