Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
The Parthenon is really only a farmyard over which someone put a roof; colonades and sculptures were added because there were people in Athens who happened to be working and wanted to express themselves.
The spiritual (i.e. the supersensory) has many degrees; thus, the term 'spiritual' is used both for the scale of degrees away from the physical towards the spirit, but also only for the spiritual proper.
My aim in life is to make pictures and drawings, as many and as well as I can; then, at the end of my life... looking back with love and tender regret, and thinking, 'Oh, the pictures I might have made!'
There's something of a painting of a woman that represents all women - and by extension, all of humanity - that I just find very exciting. It's a nice distillation, I think, of what it means to be alive.
Art is the lens through which I experience the world. Art is the medium to present the human condition... love, fear, bewilderment, pleasure, distaste, brotherhood and all the subtleties that we all know.
We are a compound of both here and hereafter; we shall be made responsible for the actions of both while here. Anything beyond this is beyond our power to prove, and would be of no real value if we could.
Artists don't really want to be marginalized. They believe that everybody should be able to appreciate the experience that an artist gives them, an experience that connects us to each other in a deep way.
The realization that reason and anti-reason, sense and nonsense, design and chance, consciousness and unconsciousness, belong together as necessary parts of a whole - this was the central message of Dada.
[People] want me to finish things. But I see them in such a way and paint them accordingly. ... Nothing is simpler than to complete pictures in a superficial sense. Never does one lie so cleverly as then.
It requires courage to face and to conquer the immense weight of inertia and the dead and dying traditions and sophistications that clutter the minds of men and mould them into the mimicry of living ways.
The men of experiment are like the ant; they only collect and use. But the bee...gathers its materials from the flowers of the garden and of the field, but transforms and digests it by a power of its own.
Gravity is not controlled physically in us by one of the 5 ordinary senses. We always reduce a gravity experience to an autocognizance, real or imagined, registered inside us in the region of the stomach.
I am a communist and my painting is a communist painting. But if I were a shoemaker, Royalist or Communist or anything else, I would not necessarily hammer my shoes in any special way to show my politics.
It isn't up to the painter to define the symbols. Otherwise it would be better if he wrote them out in so many words! The public who look at the picture must interpret the symbols as they understand them.
I would like to manage to prevent people from ever seeing how a picture of mine has been done. What can it possibly matter? What I want is that the only thing emanating from my pictures should be emotion.
The beautiful, which is perhaps inseparable from art, is not after all tied to the subject, but to the pictorial representation. In this way and in no other does art overcome the ugly without avoiding it.
The ebb and flow as an artist is a bizarre experience, for sure. I was lucky enough to become successful pretty young - in late '79, 1980 - with a body of work that got recognized and became an archetype.
In a way, painting is like wine: it is as old, as simple, as primitive and as varied. Like wine, it is a very specific means of expression, with a limited vocabulary, but vast in its expressive potential.
I cannot help thinking that the best way of knowing God is to love many things. Love this friend, this person, this thing, whatever you like, and you will be on the right road to understanding Him better.
I turned my thoughts to a still more novel mode... to compose pictures on canvas similar to representations on the stage... my picture is my stage, and men and women my players exhibited in a 'dumb' show.
I would say off the cuff that I am an anxious person. I worry about everything. I need to know everything. I tend to live in a state of anxiety with the feeling that life is some kind of great catastrophe.
My way is to seize an image the moment it has formed in my mind, to trap it as a bird and to pin it at once to canvas. Afterward I start to tame it, to master it. I bring it under control and I develop it.
A modeled form is less striking than one which is not. Modeling prevents shock and limits movement to the visual depth. Without modeling or chiaroscuro depth is limitless: movement can stretch to infinity.
What I love in art is that it takes known combinations and reorders them in a way that sheds light on something that they have never seen before or allows to consider the world in a slightly different way.
Keep a record of every picture you paint, have them photographed and write down where they went. Some day, when one reaches a great age, there will be calls for a Retrospective Exhibition of a life's work.
Principles for the Development of a Complete Mind: Study the science of art. Study the art of science. Develop your senses- especially learn how to see. Realize that everything connects to everything else.
Before seeing 'The Pride of the Yankees,' you may or may not know that the Yankees referred to are the ones who win the World Series each year. After seeing it you will find that the reference is indirect.
You can go to the moon or walk under the sea, or anything else you like, but painting remains painting because it eludes such investigation. It remains there like a question. And it alone gives the answer.
We artists are indestructible; even in a prison, or in a concentration camp, I would be almighty in my own world of art, even if I had to paint my pictures with my wet tongue on the dusty floor of my cell.
Motivation is in the world around us. We have an infinite amount of material at our disposal, in the lives of those we meet, in what we see and feel, in what we discuss and from the passion of every woman.
Democracy with its semi-civilization sincerely cherishes junk. The artists power should be spiritual. But the power of the majority is material. When these worlds meet occasionally, it is pure coincidence.
There is no blue without yellow and without orange, and if you put in blue, then you must put in yellow, and orange too, mustn't you? Oh well, you will tell me that what I write to you are only banalities.
When I'm at my best, I'm trying to destabilize myself and figure out new ways of approaching art as a provocation. I think I am at my best when I push myself into a place where I don't have all the answers.
When you go back to the days when I was studying how to paint, some of the things that excited me most was to go into the Huntington Library and Gardens and to see the amazing pictures of the landed gentry.
And, since the model he faithfully copies is not going to be hung up next to the picture, since the picture is going to be there on its own, it is of no interest whether it is an accurate copy of the model.
Everyone will recognize that each sound carries with it a tangle of sensations, already well-known and exhausted, which predispose the listener to boredom, in spite of the efforts of all musical innovators.
I shy away from the word 'creation.' In the ordinary, social meaning of the word - well, it's very nice, but fundamentally, I don't believe in the creative function of the artist. He's a man like any other.
My Ready-Mades have nothing to do with the 'objet trouve' because the so-called 'found object' is completely directed by personal taste. Personal taste decides that this is a beautiful object and is unique.
Nature is my springboard. From her I get my initial impetus. I have tried to relate the visible drama of mountains, trees, and bleached fields with the fantasy of wind blowing and changing colors and forms.
A painting is not thought out in advance. While it is being done, it changes as one’s thoughts change. And when it’s finished, it goes on changing, according to the state of mind of whoever is looking at it
Every intelligent painter carries the whole culture of modern painting in his head. It is his real subject, of which everything he paints in both an homage and a critique, and everything he says is a gloss.
Anything you do will be an abuse of somebody else's aesthetics. I think you're born an artist or not. I couldn't have learned it. And I hope I never do because knowing more only encourages your limitations.
When Sinatra said, 'For my money, Tony Bennett is the best singer I've ever heard,' it changed my career completely. He was my best friend, and I was his best friend... but I was never part of the Rat Pack.
I can be so involved that I am no longer conscious of my needs or even of any pains. But there also have been many times when I felt the exhaustion - when it was physically painful, but I just couldn't stop.
I feel the desire, or rather the intense need, to do something useful for society, and that is what stimulates me. In every situation I always look for what is positive and beneficial for my fellow citizens.
I deny that art can be taught, or, in other words, maintain that art is completely individual, and that the talent of each artist is but the result of his own inspiration and his own study of past tradition.
If I had to, I would ask first of all: why do things move in your work? It's the most simple, and also the most complicated, question. And I answer: things move because if they didn't move, they might move .
He [Michael Jackson] would choose specific moments. They were art history books that I prefer. They were paintings that he prefers. It's this dance back and forth. We were halfway through the dance. He died.
A painter was asked why, since he made such beautiful figures, which were but dead things, his children were so ugly; to which the painter replied that he made his pictures by day, and his children by night.
It is no small benefit on finding oneself in bed in the dark to go over again in the imagination the main lines of the forms previously studied, or other noteworthy things conceived by ingenious speculation.