Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I like living, breathing better than working...my art is that of living. Each second, each breath is a work which is inscribed nowhere, which is neither visual nor cerebral, it's a sort of constant euphoria.
My work embodies little visions of the great intangible. ... Some will say he's gone mad - others will look and say he's looked in at the lattices of Heaven and come back with the madness of splendor on him.
Who made art history? Not the most reasonable people. The mad men did. If painting is the mirror of a time, it must be mad to have a true image of what that time is. To one madness we oppose another madness.
There are people who can't stand the pain. What happens is they begin to develop some kind of technique to keep out of that hole. Once they do that, they're finished. They never go any further. They're done.
If there's no unity in your work, then you've deliberately made yourself into that kind of person. You don't want that unity in your work. You've made some kind of satisfactory arrangement with your culture.
Everybody has the same energy potential. The average person wastes his in a dozen little ways. I bring mine to bear on one thing only: my paintings, and everything else is sacrificed to it...myself included.
If I paint a hammer and sickle people may think it is a representation of Communism, but for me it is only a hammer and sickle. I just want to reproduce the objects for what they are, not for what they mean.
I like all paintings. I always look at the paintings, good or bad, in barbershops, furniture stores, provincial hotels. I'm like a drinker who needs wine. As long as it is wine, it doesn't matter which wine.
If the universal is the essential, then it is the basis of all life and art. Recognizing and uniting with the universal therefore gives us the greatest aesthetic satisfaction, the greatest emotion of beauty.
But on the road that I'm on I must continue; if I do nothing, if I don't study, if I don't keep on trying, then I'm lost, then woe betide me. That's how I see this, to keep on, keep on, that's what's needed.
The cold, mean 'Sunset Boulevard' - a beautiful title, though I suspect it was shot on another boulevard - is further proof of the resurgence of art in the Hollywood of super-craftsmen with insuperable taste.
My approach tends to be from experiments. I need the challenge. If I know how to do something well, there's no need to do it all the time because it becomes a little monotonous. So I like to find a challenge.
Regardless of religion or race or ethnic background we are all human and we are all on this planet together. So what better reason do you need to not tolerate any form of violence against another human being?
The stuff of thought is the seed of the artist. Dreams form the bristles of the artist's brush. As the eye functions as the brain's sentry, I communicate my innermost perceptions through the art, my worldview.
To know how to structure the joke perfectly so that the narrative information is given in the right tempo, in just the right dose - it sometimes takes quite a lot of work. It seems easy when you hear the joke.
All beautiful and noble qualities have been united in me... I shall be the fruit which will leave eternal vitality behind even after its decay. How great must be your joy, therefore, to have given birth to me.
I think the defect actually lies with male artists. Male artists often border on idiocy, while it's important for a woman not to be that way, if possible. Women are outstanding in science, just as good as men.
After tea it's back to painting - a large poplar at dusk with a gathering storm. From time to time instead of this evening painting session I go bowling in one of the neighbouring villages, but not very often.
This bored fantastic woman, with her animal nature, giving herself the pleasure of seeing her enemy struck down, not a particularly keen one for her because she is so weary of having all her desires satisfied.
The whole world, as we experience it visually, comes to us through the mystic realm of color. Our entire being is nourished by it. This mystic quality of color should likewise find expression in a work of art.
The art of pictorial creation is so complicated - it is so astronomical in its possibilities of relation and combination that it would take an act of super-human concentration to explain the final realization.
Painting is a field that attracts a lot of lazy people. You can just sort of sit and wait for things to come to you. I know a lot of painters who'll sit and chat it up all night. But God, I just can't do that.
Beauty does not lie in the face. It lies in the harmony between a person and his or her industry. Beauty is expression. When I paint a mother I try to render her beautiful by the mere look she gives her child.
Constable himself knew the value of such studies, for he rarely parted with them. He used to say of his studies and pictures that he had no objection to part with the corn, but not with the field that grew it.
I have a fondness for making paintings that go beyond just having a conversation about art for art's sake or having a conversation about art history. I actually really enjoy looking at broader popular culture.
The mole has very small eyes and it always lives under ground; and it lives as long as it is in the dark but when it comes into the light it dies immediately, because it becomes known;--and so it is with lies.
The painter who draws by practise and judgment of the eye without the use of reason is like the mirror which reproduces within itself all the objects which are set opposite to it without knowledge of the same.
There are several types of movie space, the three most important being: (1) the field of the screen, (2) the psychological space of the actor, and (3) the area of experience and geography that the film covers.
Above all, artists must not be only in art galleries or museums - they must be present in all possible activities. The artist must be the sponsor of thought in whatever endeavor people take on, at every level.
I'm purposeless. I'm making art because I want you to look at that painting and I want it to affect you in some way, to change what you see, to change how you see it. To change how you see something, whatever.
I want to be as though new-born, knowing nothing, absolutely nothing. Then I want to do something modest; to work out by myself a tiny, formal motive, one that my pencil will be able to hold without technique.
Painting and sculpture are very archaic forms. It's the only thing left in our industrial society where an individual alone can make something with not just his own hands, but brains, imagination, heart maybe.
Experience was my only teacher; I knew little of the modern art movement. When I first saw the works of the Impressionists, van Gogh, van Dongen, and Fauves, I admired it. But I had to seek the true way alone.
In the Fragments, sensations are more profound and richly clarified through deliberate and explicit pattern; emotions are given a sequence and development such as the exigencies of practical life rarely permit.
The reverse process is extremely important to me - that artistic images can inspire to words and different myths, and that in certain cultures this process has been the normal relation between images and words.
My rejection at the Salon brought an end to my hesitation [to settle in Paris] since after this failure I can no longer claim to cope... alas, that fatal rejection has virtually taken the bread out of my mouth.
Poetry' is what distinguishes the cubist paintings Picasso and I arrived at intuitively from the lifeless sort of painting those who followed us tried, with such unfortunate results, to arrive at theoretically.
When I paint a portrait I want to know more than just the looks of the person. I want to know how they live and what their feelings are... It then becomes more than just physiognomy, but the feel of the person.
Unlike the background in many of the paintings that I was inspired by or paintings that I borrowed poses from - the great European paintings of the past - the background in my work does not play a passive role.
Experiences, much more than instruction, are a seeing with the inner eye - finding a channel to our essential inner life, a door to our deepest understanding wherein we have the capacity for universal response.
Each time I undertake to paint a picture I have a sensation of leaping into space. I never know whether I shall fall on my feet. It is only later that I begin to estimate more exactly the the effect of my work.
Spatial art does not begin with a poetic mood or idea, but with construction of one or more figures, with the harmonizing of several colors and tones, or with the devaluation of spatial relationships and so on.
My art collection is dominated by tribal art from Nigeria where I taught school, from New Guinea where we've travelled, and by Canadian Haida pieces. My own art is either on exhibition or owned by other people!
If you give a child something very complex to paint, such as a bouquet of flowers or a natural landscape, if he is very good, eventually he will get back - like Cezanne - to the essential forms of what he sees.
I tried sex once with a woman and that woman was Gala. It was overrated. I tried sex once with a man and that man was the famous juggler Federico Garcia Lorca [the Spanish Surrealist poet]. It was very painful.
I think I care about beauty, but I don't go for it. I hope it sometimes might be in there. I think, maybe, more in terms of a beautiful moment than trying to figure out what beauty is or what people respond to.
I am astonished at the high prices paid for works by painters who are dead, prices none of them could expect when they were alive. It is a kind of tulip trade, in which living painters suffer but do not profit.
All my pictures are a kind of revision of my original idea. This is surely very different from the way in which Japanese or Chinese artists work: their themes are pre-ordained, whereas mine are invented at will.
I considered that the painter's personality should be kept out of things, and therefore pictures should be anonymous. It was I who decided that pictures should not be signed, and for a time Picasso did the same.
When I went to the Studio Museum in Harlem, there was a type of freedom that existed where I didn't have to think about professors, where I didn't have to think about much of anything other than my own practice.