Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I couldn't portray a woman in all her natural loveliness... I haven't the skill. No one has. I must, therefore, create a new sort of beauty.
I can paint and draw. I believe this myself and a few other people say that they believe this too. But I'm not certain of whether it's true.
I have never looked for dream in reality or reality in dream. I have allowed my imagination free play, and I have not been led astray by it.
I don't really have a historical overview of my work at all. I'm not an art historian. I don't see that there's this period and that period.
Abstract is not a style. I simply want to make a surface work. This is just a use of space and form: it's an ambivalence of forms and space.
I was 12 in 1989 during perestroika, when my mother found a program that sent me to Russia to study art in the forests outside of Leningrad.
Do not imitate one another's style. If you do, so far as your art is concerned you will be called a grandson, rather than the son of Nature.
To all appearances, the artist acts like a mediumistic being who, from the labyrinth beyond time and space, seeks his way out to a clearing.
I didn't abandon everything at a moment's notice - on the contrary. I returned to France from America, leaving the 'Large Glass' unfinished.
I'm a joker who has understood his epoch and has extracted all he possibly could from the stupidity, greed and vanity of his contemporaries.
All individual thought is dissolved in universal thought, as all form is dissolved in the universal plastic means of Abstract-Real painting.
I always imagine that I want to make art that is going to kill you,whether it’s going to do it visually or physically, I’ll take either way.
I dislike a picture that is too suave or too skilfully done. But, contrariwise, I also dislike a picture that looks too inept or blundering.
You can't make either life or art, you have to work in the hole in between, which is undefined. That's what makes the adventure of painting.
When the creations of a genius collide with the mind of a layman, and produce an empty sound, there is little doubt as to which is at fault.
If I'm going to be anything more than average, if anyone is going to remember me, then I need to go further, in art, in life, in everything!
There is a sun, a light that for want of another word I can only call yellow, pale sulphur yellow, pale golden citron. How lovely yellow is!
We are having wind and rain here, and I am very glad not to be alone. I work from memory on bad days, and that would not do if I were alone.
Life is very short... but I would like to live four times and if I could, I would set out to do no other things than I am seeking now to do.
The ideal of perfect Success is an ideal belonging to the same sort of individual as the inventor of Equal Rights of man and Perfectibility.
The ideas of a time are like the clothes of a season: they are as arbitrary, as much imposed by some superior will which is seldom explicit.
The artist has only to remain true to his dream and it will possess his work in such a manner that it will resemble the work of no other man.
It took me time to understand my water lilies. I had planted them for the pleasure of it; I grew them without ever thinking of painting them.
The only merit I have is to have painted directly from nature with the aim of conveying my impressions in front of the most fugitive effects.
I am enslaved to my work, always wanting the impossible, and never, I believe, have I been less favoured by the endlessly changeable weather.
You can't buy your privacy back. Because I was already doing OK, and to have this abstract amount of money now, I cannot buy my privacy back.
I am after painting reality impressed on the mind so hard that it returns as a dream, but I am not after painting dreams as such, or fantasy.
You know, it was just another presentation of my work, and a funny one, because the cards are quite different from the normal Tarot deck, no?
My interest in painting is recording things. I think of myself as almost a documentary filmmaker... I've gotten into some curious situations.
Go to nature with no parti pris. You should not know what your picture is to look like until it is done. Just see the picture that is coming.
If ever a painter wrought a miracle of illusion with brush and pigment that painter was Velazquez in his Las Meninas, at the Prado in Madrid.
My mother introduced to me as a child the world of language: the way in which translation can be a system by which you can understand others.
My talent lies in the expression of my life and creative power through light, colour and form. As a painter I can convey the essence of life.
Being engulfed in practice without delicate knowledge related to it, is in many ways like entering a ship without knowing where it is headed.
Of several bodies, all equally large and equally distant, that which is most brightly illuminated will appear to the eye nearest and largest.
I could never put anything into a picture that wasn't actually there in front of me. That would be a pointless lie, a mere bit of artfulness.
It is through observation and perception of atmosphere that he [the artist] can register the feeling that he wishes his painting to give out.
An artist must find his expression closely linked to his individual experience or else follow in the old grooves resulting in lifeless forms.
Painting is neither decorative amusement, nor the plastic invention of felt reality; it must be every time: invention, discovery, revelation.
Cease speaking of enemies when an achievement can kindle a great light. Solitude will transmit the message better than the murmurs of crowds.
I have never had time for the idea of searching. Whenever I wanted to express something, I did so without thinking of the past or the future.
The revolutionary artist does not only focus on the negative aspects of capitalist lives, but also creates visions of a revolutionary future.
I wish to approach truth as closely as is possible, and therefore I abstract everything until I arrive at the fundamental quality of objects.
My insights come in periods of working. There are wonderful moments of surprise, but I'm superstitious enough not to want to talk about them.
I don't collect books just because other people collect them, and I'm not going to have books in my collection if I think it's badly written.
It is not necessary for the public to know whether I am joking or whether I am serious, just as it is not necessary for me to know it myself.
The painter must always seek the essence of things, always represent the essential characteristics and emotions of the person he is painting.
If an Artist love his Art for its own sake, he will delight in excellence wherever he meets it, as well in the work of another as in his own.
I had rather, if cruelty has been prevented by the four prints [The Four Stages of Cruelty], be maker of them than of the [Raphael] cartoons.
The artist's interest cannot be restricted to a single field; he must seek the highest perception of everything, of the whole and its details.