Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
The picture surface recedes just as much in the 20th century as it did in the 15th. The techniques of making pictures have hardly changed.
I thought to live on an island was like living on a boat. Islands intrigue me. You can see the perimeters of your world. It's a microcosm.
Art addresses itself to the mind, and not to the eyes. It has always been considered in this way by primitive peoples, and they are right.
But You know Landscape is my mistress - 'tis to her that I look for fame - and all that the warmth of the imagination renders dear to Man.
With the most primitive means the artist creates something which the most ingenious and efficient technology will never be able to create.
A good landscape painting is not just a demonstration of competent application of paint. It must offer a feeling of homage to the subject.
Let proportion be found not only in numbers and measures, but also in sounds, weights, times, and positions, and what ever force there is.
I have discovered that a screw-shaped device such as this, if it is well made from starched linen, will rise in the air if turned quickly.
Each man is always in the middle of the surface of the earth and under the zenith of his own hemisphere, and over the centre of the earth.
Just as iron rusts from disuse, and stagnant water putrefies, or when cold turns to ice, so our intellect wastes unless it is kept in use.
I came to feel an artist might use anything - a dot, a line, the most conventional or unconventional symbol - t say what he wanted to say.
To paint is always to start at the beginning again, yet being unable to avoid the familiar arguments about what you see yourself painting.
Only the mature artist who works from a model is capable of seeing the body for itself, only he has the opportunity for prolonged viewing.
There will always be those who want to make paintings of the human form with all its parts all where they should be, in spite of progress.
You wait until life is in the frame, then you have the permission to click. I like the adventure of waiting until the whole frame is full.
The artist is always engaged in writing a detailed history of the future because he is the only person aware of the nature of the present.
In general, my paintings are multifocal. You can't call it unfocused space, but not being fixed to a single focus is very much of our time.
No longer shall I paint interiors with men reading and women knitting. I will paint living people who breathe and feel and suffer and love.
My forms are geometric, but they don't interact in a geometric sense. They're just forms that exist everywhere, even if you don't see them.
All art needs this visible world and will always need it. Quite simply because, being accessible to all, it is the key to all other worlds.
Emotion should not be rendered by an excited trembling; it can neither be added on nor be imitated. It is the seed, the work is the flower.
One really beautiful wrist motion, that is synchronized with your head and heart, and you have it. It looks as if it were born in a minute.
One really beautiful wrist motion, that is synchronised with your head and heart, and you have it. It looks as if it were born in a minute.
Matisse was very clear about saying that you have to blow your own trumpet and explain yourself, which I think has been slightly forgotten.
I once was interviewed and got so exasperated that I said, 'What do you want, a shopping list?' They kept asking, 'What's in this picture?'
My tendency towards bareness and simplification has been practiced in three fields: modeling, colors, and the figuration of the personages.
A mere copier of nature can never produce any thing great, can never raise and enlarge the conceptions, or warm the heart of the spectator.
I'm not a pessimist. Maybe I don't have a primitive feeling of happiness, that is true. Sometimes my color is happy but not the expression.
The human condition is not served by our technical ability to transmit a televised image around the world - if that image is totally inane.
Of the four elements water is the second in weight and the second in respect of mobility. It is never at rest until it unites with the sea.
A painter's tastes must grow out of what so obsesses him in life that he never has to ask himself what it is suitable for him to do in art.
You ask why I'm fascinated by the human figure? As a human animal, I am interested in some of my fellow animals: in their minds and bodies.
What would I do with money? I have enough for my needs. I don't want any more. If I had a lot, I would have to care for it, worry about it.
In earlier times artists liked to show what was actually visible... nowadays we are concerned with reality, rather than the merely visible.
The longer a line, the more of the time element it contains. Distance is time whereas a surface is apprehended more in terms of the moment.
It is good taste, and good taste alone, that possesses the power to sterilize and is always the first handicap to any creative functioning.
When I got into art school, I thought it was paradise. I wanted to be an artist so much that I was really driven and nothing could stop me.
My job is to return abstraction to the people: in a sense, to popularize it without lowering the bar, which is a lot easier said than done.
I see drawings and pictures in the poorest huts, in the dirtiest corner. And my mind is drawn toward these things by an irresistible force.
I myself believe that there is in every painter's life a period of making absurdities. In my case I think that period is already long past.
Limitation of means is a precondition of excellence. Creative freedom chooses its limitations. Destructive freedom rejects them heedlessly.
Don't try to make comparisons between your own pictures. Forget what you have done and think only of making the best of what you are doing.
During every really creative act, the artist finds himself homeless. To overcome this state he has to call up his last reserves of strength.
Everything is in constant flux, from state to state, from good to bad and back again... only in transmutation, perpetual motion, lies truth.
I do not always find the streets interesting, so I wait until I see picturesque groups and those that compose well in relation to the whole.
'Death & the Roses' came out of ideas about flagellation and guilt and from looking at Piero della Francesca's 'The Flagellation of Christ.'
To have gone to all this trouble to get to this is just too stupid! Outside there's brilliant sunshine but I don't feel up to looking at it.
When I look at nature I feel as if I'll be able to paint it all, note it all down, and then you might as well forget it once you're working.
In Boston, I developed my eye from the drawing. In Paris, I was fascinated by what my eye saw in the way that Paris is built, its 'measure.'
The artist is not responsible to any one. His social role is asocial... his only responsibility consists in an attitude to the work he does.