Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
The church is not made up of one person but a whole congregation, and they should be able to interact with art without being told what to think.
In the United States there has been a kind of a structure in the Modern art world. The New York School was nearly a coherent thing-for a minute.
Traditionally the Nude was used to express formulations about life as larger-than-life, as Heroic or Ideal... The nude is not a 'genre' subject.
It will be difficult to name a class of landscape in which the sky is not the key note, the standard of scale, and the chief organ of sentiment.
I can recommend nothing better... than that you endeavor to infuse into your works what you learn from the contemplation of the works of others.
By and large, most of the work that we see in the great museums throughout the world are populated with people who don't happen to look like me.
Emulation and imitation can legitimately influence one's development, but ultimately the artist must find his own path - and be true to himself.
I think of myself as a kind of reporter; I report on the nature of certain events. I think of art as a report on civilization at a certain time.
You don't get into trouble because of the things you don't know. It is the things you don't know you don't know that really get you into a mess.
The painter is not an intellectual if, when he has painted a nude woman, he gives us the idea that she is just about to put her clothes back on.
God is really only another artist. He invented the giraffe, the elephant and the cat. He has no real style, He just goes on trying other things.
In life you throw a ball. You hope it will reach a wall and bounce back so you can throw it again. You hope your friends will provide that wall.
The more horrible this world (as today, for instance), the more abstract our art, whereas a happy world brings forth an art of the here and now.
Walk on a rainbow trail; walk on a trail of song, and all about you will be beauty. There is a way out of every dark mist, over a rainbow trail.
Most artists try to break your heart, or they accidentally break their own hearts.But I find the quietness in the ordinary much more satisfying.
Suffice it to say that black and white are also colors... for their simultaneous contrast is as striking as that of green and red, for instance.
There is always an unconscious collaboration among artists.. ..the artist who imagine himself a Robinson Crusoe is either a primitive or a fool.
I never view aesthetic ideas as having an existence purely of their own but as a function they have in connection with political or moral values.
Only my current situation has enabled me to accomplish the expensive task of demonstrating that the preferred sustenance of painting is painting.
It seems the deeper, truer personality of the artist only emerges in the making of decisions... in refusing and accepting, changing and revising.
In my childhood I always felt that I was treated unjustly, without a mother, sick, and with the threat of punishment in Hell hanging over my head
I made my first trip west of the Hudson and it was a revelation. The naked musculature of the Rockies was overpowering and my painting responded.
There are no rules. That is how art is born, how breakthroughs happen. Go against the rules or ignore the rules. That is what invention is about.
Only the human figure exists; landscape is, and should be, no more than an accessory; the painter exclusively of landscape is nothing but a bore.
To me, dance is so ethereal and elusive, so much of an illusion. After a performance, that's it. With vocals and music, you have good recordings.
I never saw an ugly thing in my life: for let the form of an object be what it may - light, shade, and perspective will always make it beautiful.
All the gestures of children are graceful; the reign of distortion and unnatural attitudes commences with the introduction of the dancing master.
Color in color is felt at any and every place of the pictorial organization; in its immediacy - its particularity. Color must be felt throughout.
My mother's from Texas. Small town outside of Waco called Downsville. And my father's from Nigeria. And so I guess I'm properly African-American.
Nature is the source of all true knowledge. She has her own logic, her own laws, she has no effect without cause nor invention without necessity.
To achieve vital harmony in a picture it must be constructed out of parts in themselves incomplete, brought into harmony only at the last stroke.
A newspaper that you're not reading can be used for anything; and the same people didn't think it was immoral to wrap their garbage in newspaper.
Many a real genius is lost in the fictitious character of the Gentleman. I am the most inconsistent, changeable being so full of fits and starts.
I want to do drawings which touch some people... In either figure or landscape I wish to express, not sentimental melancholy, but serious sorrow.
As for the subject matter in my painting.. ..it is very often an incidental thing in the background, elusive and unclear, that really stirred me.
the 'total overpaintings' developed... through incessant reworking. The original motif peeped through the edges. Gradually it vanished completely.
I have tons of art books. I have them all over the place. They are in my car, in my bag, and in my studio. There are books around me all the time.
The word 'paradox' has always had a kind of magic for me, and I think my pictures have a paradoxical quality, a paradox of chaos and order in one.
Ever since I started painting, I have tried to get the fluidity and surprise of image connection, the simultaneity of film montage, into painting.
In my childhood I always felt that I was treated unjustly, without a mother, sick, and with the threat of punishment in Hell hanging over my head.
Romanticism is not just about being in a fixed state of endless beauty, because you can't live like that or live on that, that's what I've learnt.
People in general are scared to death of the war and all the exhibitions have been a failure, because the rich bitches don't want to buy anything.
The most important part of the body is the brain. Of my face, I like the eyebrows and eyes. Aside from that, I like nothing. My head is too small.
A Crow is known wherever he is met by his beautiful white dress, and his tall and elegant figure; the greater part of the men being six feet high.
When we see men of worth, we should think of equalling them; when we see men of a contrary character, we should turn inward and examine ourselves.
Nature is a collective idea, and, though its essence exist in each individual of the species, can never in its perfection inhabit a single object.
I don't look at the work of my contemporaries very much; I tend to look at pictures by dead artists. It's much easier to get near their paintings.
A collection makes its own demands. Many artists have been collectors. I think of it rather as an illness. I felt it was using up too much energy.
I would like people to see my work as a rehabilitation of scorned values and, in any case, make no mistake about it, a work of ardent celebration.
I think of my studio as a vegetable garden, where things follow their natural course. They grow, they ripen. You have to graft. You have to water.