Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Cover the canvas at the first go, then work at it until you see nothing more to add.
To my mind, one does not put oneself in place of the past; one only adds a new link.
It's not at all naturally human to see something like the Grand Canyon as beautiful.
The language of art is celestial in origin and can only be understood by the chosen.
What counts most is finding new ways to get the world down in paint on my own terms.
Thanks to the oval I have discovered the meaning of the horizontal and the vertical.
The inability of some critics to connect the dots doesn't make pointillism pointless
When I was a young boy, I was obsessed with skulls and mummies and things like that.
Life is rapid, art is slow, occasion coy, practice fallacious, and judgment partial.
Ancient art was the tyrant of Egypt, the mistress of Greece and the servant of Rome.
I dont think you can lightly paint a picture. Its an activity I take very seriously.
Oddly enough, my grandfather probably had more of an influence on me than my father.
It's so easy just to see the one-to-one narrative between presence and non-presence.
Avoid the precepts of those thinkers whose reasoning is not confirmed by experience.
There is no higher or lower knowledge, but one only, flowing out of experimentation.
Why does the eye see a thing more clearly in dreams than the imagination when awake?
When Fortune comes, seize her in front with a sure hand, because behind she is bald.
Fame alone raises herself to Heaven, because virtuous things are in favour with God.
There is no foreground or background, only a continuity of interlacing relationships
I have placed there a little door opening on to the mysterious. I have made stories.
Others have seen what is and asked why. I have seen what could be and asked why not.
You have to have an idea of what you are going to do, but it should be a vague idea.
The development that produces great art is a moral and not an aesthetic development.
There's some mysterious process at work here, which I don't even want to understand.
An artist can have an intention, but the viewer has their own subjective experience.
A lot of us grew up in public. That often means that you have to fail in public too.
I prefer images that are less specific, so there is room for everyone's imagination.
The conventional definition of reality, and the idea of 'normal life', mean nothing.
It sounds so simple, but if you just be yourself, you're different than anyone else.
More than anybody else I'd like to thank Count Basie for teaching me how to perform.
A time will come when the eye of man will perceive colors as feelings within itself.
One may have a blazing hearth in one's soul, and yet no one ever comes to sit by it.
The diseases that we civilized people labor under most are melancholy and pessimism.
Sometimes art seems to be something very sublime, and, as you say, something sacred.
Ideas for work are coming to me in abundance...I'm going like a painting-locomotive.
Good new art may not look like art. Inspiration doesn't follow style, it creates it.
The artist is he who can take something ordinary and wring out of it attar of roses.
Art is not delivered like the morning paper; it has to be stolen from Mount Olympus.
Do not keep what you have selfishly bottled up; pour it out, share it with the world.
We cannot inherit a fixed, unmoving view of life and of art from the past generation.
If I could get the respect of 14-year-olds, I'm happy. They're the toughest audience.
I'm black, and it's a very important part of what I am. I'm not embarrassed about it.
My life provides me with these images that become expressions of my daily experience.
I am that clumsy human, always loving, loving, loving. And loving. And never leaving.
Whatever is valuable in painting is precisely what one is incapable of talking about.
Progress in art does not consist in reducing limitations, but in knowing them better.
To worship the product and ignore its development leads to dilettantism and reaction.
Love is a disease which fills you with a desire to be desired.... - Comte de Toulouse
Painting can never show her nose in company with architecture but to have it snubbed.
To me, this was an oxymoron, doing a painting of a dancer. Dancers are always moving.