Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Art is challenging and frustrating but I don't linger in it. I work on five paintings at a time so if I'm frustrated I put one down and begin another.
Just as I am astonished that a bank clerk never eats a cheque, so too am I astonished that no painter before me ever thought of painting a soft watch.
There is nothing contemptible about an intoxicated man - if it is nothing more than a bookful of words or a roomful of notes that he has got drunk on.
The artist needs but a roof, a crust of bread, and his easel, and all the rest God gives him in abundance. He must live to paint and not paint to live.
I started painting as a hobby when I was little. I didn't know I had any talent. I believe talent is just a pursued interest. Anybody can do what I do.
I try to bring all that I am to my work and all that I experience. That includes how people react to the way I am - the prejudice and the celebrations.
Now I really feel the landscape, I can be bold and include every tone of pink and blue: it's enchanting, it's delicious, and I hope it will please you.
I learned early about the misery and dangers of life, and about the afterlife, about the external punishment which awaited the children of sin in Hell.
Modern man lives more and more in a preponderantly geometric order. All human creation mechanical or industrial is dependent upon geometric intentions.
We are connected with our own age if we recognize ourselves in relation to outside events; and we have grasped its spirit when we influence the future.
When a figure painter executes a landscape he treats it as if it were a face; Degas' landscapes are unparalleled because they are visionary landscapes.
The superiority of the Greeks seems not so much the result of climate and society, as of the simplicity of their end and the uniformity of their means.
For me an object is something living. This cigarette or this box of matches contains a secret life much more intense than that of certain human beings.
The art of seeing nature, or, in other words, the art of using models, is in reality the great object, the point to which all our studies are directed.
I think there's something important in going against the grain, and perhaps finding value in things that aren't necessarily institutionally recognized.
There are countless artists whose shoes I am not worthy to polish - whose prints would not pay the printer. The question of judgment is a puzzling one.
I paint to rest from the phenomena of the external world - to pronounce it -- and to make notations of its essences with which to verify the inner eye.
Seeing a play, listening to music - you'll always contextualize it in your own way. Whoever you are, wherever you are; I think that's really important.
In a successful painting everything is integral - all the parts belong to the whole. If you remove an aspect or element you are removing its wholeness.
My freedom will be so much the greater and more meaningful, the more narrowly I limit my field of action and the more I surround myself with obstacles.
I don't think any one person, whether artist or not, has been given permission by anyone to put the responsibility of the way things are on anyone else
The difference between false memories and true ones is the same as for jewels: it is always the false ones that look the most real, the most brilliant.
Most of my painting is done sitting in a chair with a book. I'd say it's 80 per cent sitting and reading, 10 per cent eating and ten per cent painting.
I've taken stuff from people, too. You know though, if you steal from one person, you're just a thief. But if you steal from everyone, that's research.
To me, life is a gift, and it's a blessing to just be alive. And each person should learn what a gift it is to be alive no matter how tough things get.
I shouldn't precisely have chosen madness if there had been any choice, but once such a thing has taken hold of you, you can't very well get out of it.
To an art historian a Giotto is a 14th Century painting. To an artist it was painted yesterday. We free ourselves from the past when we see it freshly.
Purplish brown? Let's agree it / is a color so bad we all flee it / it has no good use / so let's name it Puce / from the sound we make when we see it.
A hundred things are done today in the divine name of Youth, that if they showed their true colors would be seen by rights to belong rather to old age.
Painting, which is essentially a rhythmic harmony of coloured spaces. Realism was the death of art. Great art should come from the harmony of two lines.
Beautiful, ugly, impressive, disgusting, meaningless, grim, contradictory etc … It makes no difference, as long as it is life, vigorously pouring forth.
All government is an evil, but, of the two form's of that evil, democracy or monarchy, the sounder is monarchy; the more able to do its will, democracy.
I still have a lot of pleasure doing them, but as time goes by I come to appreciate more clearly which paintings are good and which should be discarded.
If what you want to paint is the emotive mood in all its strength... then you must not sit and stare at everything and depict it exactly as one sees it.
My ideas come, wh-pheww. And I draw. Just recently, when I'm searching for ideas for paintings and sculptures, I wait for ideas, and it's always visual.
To change your mind about something is always difficult. I think that people who are big enough to admit they were wrong can be counted on your fingers.
Try everything that can be done. Be deliberate. Be spontaneous. Be thoughtful and painstaking. Be abandoned and impulsive. Learn your own possibilities.
Scientific perspective forces the objects in a picture to disappear away from the beholder instead of bringing them within his reach as painting should.
Now as before it is the vulgar and the vital and the possibility of its transformation into the beautiful which continues to challenge and fascinate me.
I'm vulnerable to criticism. Any artist is, because you work alone in your studio and, until recently, critics were the only way you'd get any feedback.
The problem with having the name Wyeth is that immediately, when people hear the name, they all of a sudden see weathered barns in a field or something.
I had been elected to the National Academy of Design in New York, and one of the requirements was that you give a portrait, a self-portrait of yourself.
Portraiture is something that we're all drawn to. I think primarily other forms - we prefer, by and large, to look at human beings than a bowl of fruit.
There shall be wings! If the accomplishment be not for me, 'tis for some other. The spirit cannot die; and man, who shall know all and shall have wings.
Science is the observation of things possible, whether present or past; prescience is the knowledge of things which may come to pass, though but slowly.
White lines in movement symbolize a unifying idea which flows through the compartmented units of life bringing the consciousness of a larger relativity.
I have to experience all the ghastly, bottomless depths for life for myself; it's for that reason that I went to war, and for that reason I volunteered.
There ought to be an absolute dictatorship... a dictatorship of painters... a dictatorship of one painter... to suppress all those who have betrayed us.
In my experience a painting is not made with colors and paint at all. I don't know what a painting is; who knows what sets off even the desire to paint?
I have found in my still-life work that I seem to be able to tell what objects are important to me by what tends to stay in the painting as it develops.