Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
The great things are not done by impulse, but by a series of small things brought together. And great things are not something accidental, but must certainly be willed.
Many painters are afraid of the blank canvas, but the blank canvas is afraid of the truly passionate painter who dares-and who has once broken the spell of 'you can't.'
The young artist... will discover out of ordinary things the meaning of ordinariness. He will not try to make them extraordinary. Only their real meaning will be stated.
I remember making a videotape in a fancy hair salon in Beverly Hills. The soundtrack in the salon had a whole worldview behind it - I was interested in things like that.
People sometimes think I take a white canvas and paint a black sign on it,but this is not true.I paint the white as well as the black and the white is just as important.
I started collecting my artist friends, artists like myself who nobody had yet noticed. In everything, all I am collecting, so to speak, are my friends - artist friends.
Only when the habit of one's consciousness to see in paintings bits of nature, madonnas and shameless nudes... has disappeared, shall we see a pure painting composition.
I have been painting models with black and brown skin only for the past years. So, I did already have this experience, this is how I have come to the paintings I do now.
Who works for glory misses oft the goal; Who works for money coins his very soul Work for the work's sake, then, and it may be, That this thing shall be added unto thee.
Painting is concerned with all the 10 attributes of sight; which are: Darkness, Light, Solidity and Colour, Form and Position, Distance and Propinquity, Motion and Rest.
I have from an early age abjured the use of meat, and the time will come when men such as I will look upon the murder of animals as they now look upon the murder of men.
I think half the point of painting a picture is that you don't know what will happen... that if painters did know what was going to happen they wouldn't bother to do it.
Remember that a painting - before it is a battle horse, a nude model, or some anecdote - is essentially a flat surface covered with colours assembled in a certain order.
It is generally admitted that the most beautiful qualities of a color are in its transparent state, applied over a white ground with the light shining through the color.
When you don't know how to pick up a brush, you don't know anything; at that moment you're an artist. I'll simply say, 'If you know less, you're better off as an artist.
I paint to evoke a changing language of symbols, a language with which to remark upon the qualities of our mysterious capacities which direct us toward ultimate reality.
Our goals can only be reached through a vehicle of a plan, in which we must fervently believe, and upon which we must vigorously act. There is no other route to success.
The disintegration of the culture starts with the artist. Im on a crusade to turn the tide in the arts, to restore dignity to the arts and, by extension, to the culture.
I think in all of the arts there are just certain people that have a gift. I think it's a certain spirituality, it's a God-given gift that just certain individuals have.
What I really search for is something that I really love hearing, something that's my own private game: If I find a song I really like, I try to do a definitive version.
Luckily for his audiences, Bennett doesn't tire of singing I Left My Heart. ... that song made me a world citizen. And when I do it, it always feels like the first time.
When we are working at a difficult task and strive after a good thing, we are fighting a righteous battle, the direct reward of which is that we are kept from much evil.
If you can allow colour to breathe, to occupy its own space, to play its own game in its unstable way, it's wanton behaviour, so to speak. It is promiscuous like nothing.
All my paintings are usually done in drawing form, very small. I make notations in drawings first, and then I make a collage for color. But drawing is always my notation.
A precision of composition and figuration is what I'm working toward. I've always felt viewers should have an experience without having to ask what the hell is was about.
Scarlatti [Kirkpatrick] started writing sonatas when he was 66 and the idea that he ran off 500 or so after he was 66 was just too much for me to resist. It's just great.
You put a blob of yellow here, and another at the further edge of the canvas: straight away a rapport is established between them. Colour acts in the way that music does.
In the end, what I'm trying to say as a person who does all this travel and fashions these images is that you arrive at an approximate location but never one destination.
If you cause your ship to stop and place the head of a long tube in the water and place the outer extremity to your ear, you will hear ships at a great distance from you.
Painting is concerned with the ten things you can see: these are darkness and brightness, substance and color, form and place, remoteness and nearness, movement and rest.
Oh! Speculators on things, boast not of knowing the things that nature ordinarily brings about; but rejoice if you know the end of those things which you yourself device.
As soon as you set yourself up in the position of transferring paint from one place to another, your whole culture invades you. It tells you all about the history of art.
The artist is a receptacle for emotions that come from all over the place: from the sky, from the earth, from a scrap of paper, from a passing shape, from a spider's web.
Style is often something which locks the painter into the same vision, the same technique, the same formula during years and years, sometimes during one's whole lifetime.
As tradition, the female element clings to the old art and opposes anything new - precisely because each new art moves further away from the natural appearance of things.
The disintegration of the culture starts with the artist. I'm on a crusade to turn the tide in the arts, to restore dignity to the arts and, by extension, to the culture.
I have a simple life. I mean, you just give me a drum roll, they announce my name, and I come out and sing. In my job I have a contract that says I'm a singer. So I sing.
One should arrive at leading one's conscience to a state of development so that it becomes the voice of a better and higher self, of which the ordinary self is a servant.
Men who have reached and passed 45, have a look as if waiting for the secret of the other world, and as if they were perfectly sure of having found out the secret of this.
It sounds formulaic now, but at the time, I was interested in the difference between the thing and the representation of the idea of the thing - the space between the two.
The technical procedures doubtless release energies in the artist that remain unused in the much more lightweight processes of drawing or painting (remark on printmaking).
Talent seduces us into interpretation. My sister could draw wonderfully, but she would never have hit upon the idea of becoming a painter. I never had that extreme talent.
I realized that one cannot reveal oneself without mannerism, without some evident trace of one's personality. But all the same one should not go too far in that direction.
My art flatters nobody by imitation, it courts nobody by smoothness, nobody by petitelieness without either fal-de-lal or fiddle-de-dee; how then can I hope to be popular?
The mind is but a barren soil; a soil which is soon exhausted, and will produce no crop, or only one, unless it be continually fertilized and enriched with foreign matter.
The erotic and the art historical imagination is something that gets very little play when people talk about my work, and when they rarely do, they try to problematize it.
In photography we must learn to seek, not the 'picture,' not the aesthetic of tradition, but the ideal instrument of expression, the self-sufficient vehicle for education.
The eye, the window of the soul, is the chief means whereby the understanding can most fully and abundantly appreciate the infinite works of Nature; and the ear is second.
Many are they who have a taste and love for drawing, but no talent; and this will be discernible in boys who are not diligent and never finish their drawings with shading.
It is the only point of getting up every morning: to paint, to make something good, to make something even better than before, not to give up, to compete, to be ambitious.