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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It is important to see that my paintings are ultimately stimulating. They are not at all the kind of thing that inspires despair.
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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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I think there is a degree of primitivism in what I do.. .You have to see without illusions. Without trying to protect yourself.
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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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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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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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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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I am powerless, helpless. Each time it’s a leap in the dark. A deliberate encounter with the unknown.
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The artist is the bearer of life.
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There's a perpetual duel going on between the world of the spirit and the world of things. Although the one only has meaning in relation to the other.
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I can’t say anything. There are no words.
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Each painting contains so much suffering.
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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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Each painting is linked to a fundamental drama.
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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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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 most difficult thing is not to want anything.
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I need to go towards the illogical. This world we live in destroys us. It is always governed by the same laws. You have to create images that don’t belong to it. That are totally different from those it presents us.
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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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When you cross any border there is always an uneasy moment when you feel yourself automatically an enemy. Artists don’t belong to any group or country... When you are living the truth, the world no longer exists, events become unimportant. But the way of truth is not easy.. ..if you are on the side of truth, you have no power. That’s why you are always defeated. The power, all the power, is on the side of the world.. .I have been completely absorbed in my adventure. No country, no family, no ties. I didn’t exist anymore. I just had to press on.
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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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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.