Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Something sacred, that's it. We ought to be able to say that such and such a painting is as it is, with its capacity for power, because it is "touched by God."
We must not discriminate between things. Where things are concerned there are no class distinctions. We must pick out what is good for us where we can find it.
I keep plastering it until it comes around to what I want, in terms of all I know and think about painting now, as well as in terms of the initial observation.
And I'm sort of deconstructing the process of what marks came first, what came later. Every aspect of the image is interesting to me to dissect and understand.
It is sometimes forgotten how much wit there is in certain works of abstract art. There is a certain point in undergoing anguish when one encounters the comic.
I think that I still have it in my heart someday to paint a bookshop with the front yellow and pink in the evening...like a light in the midst of the darkness.
A painter is always overjoyed when anybody pays any attention to him at all, puts him in any category, calls him anything - as long as they call him something.
I am not sure that it is a bad thing to go to a school, as I did, where the boys threw things at me, and asked if there was nothing else I could do [but draw].
Prostration is our natural position. A worm-like movement from a spot of sunlight to a spot of shade, and back, is the type of movement that is natural to men.
Making art is complicated because the categories are always changing. You just have to make your own art, and whatever categories it falls into will come later.
I was worried in the '80s that the best abstract painting had become obsessed with materiality, and painterly gestures and materiality were up against the wall.
The most important thing for everyone in Gringolandia is to have ambition and become 'somebody,' and frankly, I don't have the least ambition to become anybody.
I spent a lot of time alone; I left school to be tutored. So, most of my companions were animals. It's as simple as that. I knew more animals than I did people.
I immediately doubt things if I become satisfied with them. Being satisfied by something is a real danger for me. I hope I never lose that. That would be death.
Almost as though the painting itself becomes the embodiment of a type of struggle for visibility, and this might be considered the main subject of the painting.
I went back to my mother's house recently and I saw some of my earlier works as a 15-year-old art student. And a lot of them were reiterations of classic works.
We have - through a hundred years of photography and two decades of film - been enormously enriched... We may say we see the world with entirely different eyes.
The individual - man as a man, man as a brain, if you like - interests me more than what he makes because I've noticed that most artists only repeat themselves.
Only the series of colors on the canvas with all their power and vibrancy could, in combination with each other, render the chromatic feeling of that landscape.
Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist while still achieving milestones and outcomes as required by certain funders and policy-makers.
Two of the most frustrated trades are dentists and photographers - dentists because they want to be doctors, and photographers because they want to be painters.
Usually I am on a work for a long stretch, until a moment arrives when the air of the arbitrary vanishes, and the paint falls into positions that feel destined.
A muse comes down from Mount Olympus and changes my attitude, cheering me up - it's an inner intuition, suddenly giving a breakthrough to be able to move ahead.
I did a twenty foot print and John Cage is involved in that because he was the only person I knew in New York who had a car and who would be willing to do this.
There certainly is an affinity between a person and his work, but it is not easy to define what this affinity is, and on that question many judge quite wrongly.
If we study Japanese art, we see a man who is undoubtedly wise, philosophic and intelligent, who spends his time doing what? He studies a single blade of grass.
Painting as it is now promises to become more subtle - more like music and less like sculpture - and above all it promises color. If only it keeps this promise.
Postmodernism does not help us understand good art. It encourages art that can be easily understood and throws in something catchy to cover the loss of mystery.
True realism, materialist realism lies in the search for the expression of forms faithful to their content. But there is no content detached from human interest.
There was a time when meanings were focused and reality could be fixed; when that sort of belief disappeared, things became uncertain and open to interpretation.
No one but myself knows the anxiety I go through and the trouble I give myself to finish paintings which do not satisfy me and seem to please so very few others.
One's better off alone, and yet there are so many things that are impossible to fathom on one's own. In fact it's a terrible business and the task is a hard one.
The earliest dated monument yet discovered in Tikal and all of the Maya lowlands, Stela 29, has a Long Count date of 8.12.14.13.15, which translates to A.D. 292.
The pictures present an improvised view of life as normal. Life is shown as we think we see it but in fact never do. The pictures imitate life to find a way out.
Dada talks with you, it is everything, it includes everything, it belongs to all religions, can be neither victory nor defeat, it lives in space and not in time.
We have to save ourselves from ourselves. We have to minimize the effect our own politicians can have on our society. We have to get some rules from the outside.
I hate married men. They never make any sacrifices to the arts, but are always thinking of their duties to their wives and families or some rubbish of that sort.
What do these so-called artists mean when they preach the discovery of the'new'? Is there anything new? Everything has been done, everything has been discovered.
There's always a tug of war. Like, in the States, in America, there's certainly a higher quotient, I would imagine, of, like, macho, like, masculinity posturing.
At its best, what art does is, it points to who we as human beings and what we as human beings value. And if Black Lives Matter, they deserve to be in paintings.
Gauguin is creepy - let's just face it. He goes off into the Pacific, and he's looking at these young girls, and the colonial gaze: It's just really problematic.
Abstract art is a creative interplay between the conscious and the unconscious, with the conscious mind making all the final decisions and in control throughout.
Critics, mathematicians, scientists and busybodies want to classify everything, marking the boundaries and limits... In art, there is room for all possibilities.
I want to get to the stage where nobody can tell how a picture of mine is done. What's the point of that? Simply that I want nothing but emotion given off by it.
Color possesses me. I don't have to pursue it. It will possess me always, I know it. That is the meaning of this happy hour: Color and I are one. I am a painter.
In past times when one lived in contact with nature, abstraction was easy; it was done unconsciously. Now in our denaturalized age abstraction becomes an effort.
To pick up a cigarette wrapper or wine label or an old letter or the end of a carton is my way of dealing with those things that do not originate in me, in my I.
Painting done under pressure by artists without the necessary talent can only give rise to formlessness, as painting is a profession that requires peace of mind.
I experience a period of frightening clarity in those moments when nature is so beautiful. I am no longer sure of myself, and the paintings appear as in a dream.
Even this artistic life, which we know is not real life, appears to me to be so alive and so vital that it would be a form ingratitude not to be content with it.