Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I think visual seduction is really a lovely thing. To be able to look at something and feel you want to get closer and closer to it, and as you get closer to it, the more you drop your guard.
Well, I've always been interested in approaching a big city in a train, and I can't exactly describe the sensations, but they're entirely human and perhaps have nothing to do with aesthetics.
The idea of changing or improving the world is alien to me and seems ludicrous. Society functions, and always has, without the artist. No artist has ever changed anything for better or worse.
Everywhere there is craft and technique; everywhere there is artistry and form. Art itself, technique, is ponderous and clumsy, and because of its awkwardness it obstructs that inner element.
Although nature commences with reason and ends in experience it is necessary for us to do the opposite, that is to commence with experience and from this to proceed to investigate the reason.
There was an incident, in 1912, which 'gave me a turn,' so to speak: when I brought the 'Nude Descending a Staircase' to the Independants, and they asked me to withdraw it before the opening.
...art is something subversive. It's something that should not be free. Art and liberty, like the fire of Prometheus, are things that one must steal, to be used against the established order.
Art is never chaste. It ought to be forbidden to ignorant innocents, never allowed into contact with those not sufficiently prepared. Yes, art is dangerous. Where it is chaste, it is not art.
When I was a child, my mother said to me, 'If you become a soldier, you'll be a general. If you become a monk, you'll end up as the Pope.' Instead, I became a painter and wound up as Picasso.
Probably the most potent desire for a painter, an image-maker, is to see it. To see what the mind can think and imagine, to realize it for oneself, through oneself, as concretely as possible.
Johnny Mercer started Capitol Records, and he brought in Sinatra, Dean Martin, and Nat King Cole. He just let them sing whatever they wanted, and it became the best record company in America.
Conscience is a man's compass, and though the needle sometimes deviates, though one often perceives irregularities in directing one's course by it, still one must try to follow its direction.
I want the people looking at my work to feel a sense of all the possibilities of painting, and, through that, in life as a whole. When that happens, I feel I've accomplished something useful.
The principles of my works... are the extinction of expression, permanent covering and contemplative tranquillity... My ideal is the completely dark picture, full of some overwhelming silence.
We are not disillusioned because we have no illusions... What we have and what is our strength, is our joy in life... in all its amoral aspects. That is also the basis of our contemporary art.
To understand the magic way of thinking you have to know non-magic thinking. If you see that clearly, you will see how many magic thoughts are necessary elements even of natural science today.
Painters have always needed a sort of veil upon which they can focus their attention. It's as though the more fully the consciousness is absorbed, the greater the freedom of the spirit behind.
I get cranky real easily. So the honor of it and the wonder of it all and everything has a hard time overcoming the petty annoyances; I mean, that's simply the reality of being alive, I guess.
You paint the way you have to in order to give. That's life itself, and someone will look and say it is the product of knowing, but it has nothing to do with knowing, it has to do with giving.
Really, if you get to know pigs, they're very moody. They're not sweet little animals at all. That's what I like about them. They get depressed; they get into these snits. They're carnivorous.
I began drawing when I was nearly 3, and after finishing the sixth grade, I left school to paint and was tutored at home. My father didn't think a formal education was necessary for a painter.
If deceiving the eye were the only business of the art... the minute painter would be more apt to succeed. But it is not the eye, it is the mind which the painter of genius desires to address.
Artists are those people who sit at the intersection between the known and unknown, the rational and irrational, coming to terms with some of the confusing histories we, as artists, deal with.
This idea that my work is about hip-hop is a little reductive. What I'm interested in is the performance of masculinity, the performance of ethnicity, and how they intermingle across cultures.
Since the tubes of paint used by the artist are manufactured and ready-made products, we must conclude that all the paintings in the world are 'ready-mades aided' and also works of assemblage.
I wanted to make people think of a totally different way of living from that which we, educated people, live. I would absolutely not want anyone to find it beautiful or good without a thought.
I do not know myself how I paint it. I sit down with a white board before the spot that strikes me. I look at what is before my eyes, and say to myself, that white board must become something.
That this awareness of my own fallibility will prevent me from making many mistakes doesn't alter the fact that I'm bound to make a great many mistakes anyway. But if we fall, we get up again!
What can be said about a man who is interested in nothing but his painting? It's a pity if a man can only interest himself in one thing. But I can't do any thing else. I have only one interest.
The black line is carbon emissions to date. The red line is the status quo - a projection of where emissions will go if no new substantial policy is passed to restrain greenhouse gas emissions.
Certainly a chair can be just as interesting as a human being. But first the chair must be perceived by a human being... You should not paint the chair, but only what someone has felt about it.
But where do they find these lines in nature? I can only see luminous or obscure masses, planes that advance or planes that recede, reliefs or background. My eye never catches lines or details.
With all my work, I have not more, with my shares in the bank and the Academy, than twelve or thirteen thousand reales a year, and with all this, I am as contented as the happiest man on earth.
How long did it take me to delimit this art? Twenty years! ... It was a laborious process, but a methodical and rational one; gradually the hesitations were ironed out, but not all of a sudden.
Whatever you do in life, if you want to be creative and intelligent, and develop your brain, you must do everything with the awareness that everything, in some way, connects to everything else.
We have a definite but unknown quantity of experience at our disposal. As soon as the hourglass is turned, the sand will begin to run out and once it starts, it cannot stop until it's all gone.
Frightened, I jump up from the bank, the struggle begins anew. Bitterness has returned. I am not Pan in the reed, I am merely a human being and want to climb a few steps, but really climb them.
I had been working purely abstractly for so long, it was important for me to see whether I was working abstractly because I couldn't work any other way, or whether I was doing it out of choice.
I think maybe chance works better in a situation like music because music exists over a period of time, and you don't maintain constantly the you can't refer back from one area to another area.
I believe that the moment is near when by a procedure of active paranoiac thought, it will be possible to systematize confusion and contribute to the total discrediting of the world of reality.
There's always something every night that I learn from reacting to what the audience is reacting to. You learn what to leave out, what to put in, if you need a little more comedy or more drama.
I was possessed with a wonderful example of my Italian American family. They would come over and join us every Sunday, all my aunts and uncles and nephews and nieces, and I would sing for them.
The painter who is content with the praise of the world for what does not satisfy himself, is not an artist, but an artisan; for though his reward be only praise, his pay is that of a mechanic.
The significance of something lies in its presence here and now. I don't care what it has been or what it will become. It is the experience of things that matters, the confrontation with things.
I've always read, I've always admired writers and was lucky really to meet some extraordinary ones and become friends. Certain times you just like people, and it grows out like a nautilus shell.
Beauty, like truth, is relative to the time when one lives and to the individual who can grasp it. The expression of beauty is in direct ratio to the power of conception the artist has acquired.
Painting is... a richer language than words... Painting operates through signs which are not abstract and incorporeal like words. The signs of painting are much closer to the objects themselves.
There are different paths that one can pursue as a painter. I work with the thesis that I have not as yet reached my goal. This engagement is the necessary basis from which I plan new paintings.
The art world has become so insular. The rules have become so autodidactic that, in a sense, they lose track of what people have any interest in thinking about, talking about or even looking at.
The scene then as now was centered in New York. For the most part, I've kept a bit apart from that attractive and seductive city. I've done it by living in the country within commuting distance.