Bram van Velde Quotes
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To be nothing. Just nothing. It’s a frightening experience. You have to let go of everything.
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Everything has to end before it can begin.
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Life and mind are continuously in conflict with each other. I want happiness, security. I won't reach that by considerations of my mind; on the contrary they will lead to a certain despair of the inner person. Not what he thinks engages the artist, but what he feels.
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When you are working, you are so far away and so absorbed, it's inevitable that you fall into a vacuum when you stop.. ..every time when I finish a painting, I always have to wait to get my strength back before I can begin another.
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Part of your work feels as clear, it gives you a sense of liberation or beauty and you recognize it as necessary pavements. You are thus in a sense ready. In the other part of your work this is not the case. Therein is the hidden development, which is the true essence of art... the higher purpose, the pursuit forward that art automatically calls. The unclear part of your work needs to progress stopping is no option, is no life, no art and it is clear when by working with head and heart, the real step forward has been achieved.
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An artist’s life is all very fine and moving. But only in retrospect. In books.
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Van Gogh.. .In this world of petty calculations, he was too intense. He frightened people. They cast him out.
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If these gouaches live at all, it is because they are true, they derive from life. They are born of the unknown – and not of habit or know-how, or intention, or of some recipe.. ..there comes a time when serious work is no longer an effort. When demanding work of that kind no longer tires you.
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A painter is somebody who sees. I paint the moment when I set out. When I set out to see. And it’s the same thing for the viewer. When he approaches the canvas, he is advancing towards an encounter. The encounter with vision.
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Picasso.. ..the master.. ..being a master: 'I don't search, I find' a famous quote of Picasso, where he criticize the 'searching' artists ..the master, the mastery.. ..Producing, producing.. .He Picasso! only knows how to work, can’t do anything else. What lost souls!.. .The great risk is producing for its own sake. You must never force things. You just have to wait.
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In the first piece that you Beckett wrote about me circa 1946, you never once used the word color. That was important. I was struck by it.
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I can't say or explain anything. Pictures don’t come from your head but from life... I am always looking for life. All that escapes thought or will-power.
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When I am painting, driven by lively tensions, I want to express what’s going on in me. When that tension has ceased, when the life in me became visible, then something happened which had to happen. Over and over again you experience a work which is created in this way. What happened? It is hard to say, because it was not my mind that led but the inner desire that revealed its inner life.
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The real world with its common logic pushes us toward catastrophe. The artists seek in his work to free himself from this weight. Art is being transformed into politics, love into trade, education into an apparatus for stifling the mind. In the midst of such horrors, clearly only the dream within me has life. But how do other people live? -There is color, virginal expression - new, without a cage, without routine, without limit, a bath of sun and light. We must realize that nothing man does is of any value. The trouble is that people want to be paid. Only sick men can be artists. Their suffering pushes them into the accomplishment of deeds which reinvest the world with meaning. The sensitive man or the artist can only be a sick man in our civilized life, so full of lies. To think of art as a profession, how appealing! – Painting is man in the face of his downfall.
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The artist is the bearer of life.
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Artists who are the defenders of true life become phonies. That’s the perfidious thing about this world. Society turns anyone with a bit of life inside them into a medical case.
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I am powerless, helpless. Each time it’s a leap in the dark. A deliberate encounter with the unknown.
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Painting is an eye, a blinded eye that continues to see, and sees what blinds it.. ..this tiny little thing, which is nothing, which dominates life.
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Everyone cheats. Only artists don’t. They don’t fool people and they aren’t fooled. They are outside all that. Nobody can understand them.
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Each painting contains so much suffering.
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They make you and you have no say in it. It’s w:Godot all the time. A chain around your neck and the whip cracking behind you.
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However terrible it is, the thing never involves any sadness.
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It is true that other people can help you, and to lasting effect.. .If I hadn't had Beckett in 1940, I'm not sure I could have stood it. I am really not sure.. .At that time he he was driven by an extremely aggressive and fiery Irish spirit. That has lessened as time has gone on.. .I don't know anywhere in modern art any more faithful or more impressive picture of contemporary humanity than the one he offers us in 'The Unamable'.
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I am in the void. Nothing to hang on to.