Pablo Picasso Quotes
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When art critics get together they talk about Form and Structure and Meaning. When artists get together they talk about where you can buy cheap turpentine.
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For a long time I limited myself to one colour - as a form of discipline.
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The quality of a painter depends on the amount of past he carries with him.
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If I had known there was such a thing as Islamic Calligraphy, I would never have started to paint. I have strived to reach the highest levels of artistic mastery, but I found that Islamic Calligraphy was there ages before I was.
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Art sweeps the everyday dust from your soul.
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I have never made radically different experiments. Whenever I wanted to say something, I said it the way I believed I should.
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Everyone wants to understand art. Why don't we try to understand the song of a bird? Why do we love the night, the flowers, everything around us, without trying to understand them? But in the case of a painting, people think they have to understand.
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When there's anything to steal, I steal
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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. Boisgeloup, winter 1934.
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Art is not chaste. Those ill prepared should be allowed no contact with art. Art is dangerous. If it is chaste, it is not art.
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To arrive at abstraction, it is always necessary to begin with a concrete reality.
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Matisse makes a drawing, then he makes a copy of it. He recopies it five times, ten times, always clarifying the line. He's convinced that the last, the most stripped down, is the best, the purest, the definitive one; and in fact, most of the time, it was the first. In drawing, nothing is better than the first attempt.
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The painter goes through states of fullness and evaluation. That is the whole secret of art.
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When Matisse died, he left me his Odalisques 'as a legacy', he proclaimed.
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Style is often something which locks the painter into the same vision, the same technique, the same formula during years and years, sometimes during one's whole lifetime.
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Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist while still achieving milestones and outcomes as required by certain funders and policy-makers.
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It was thinking about Casagemas's death that started me painting in blue.
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You know, it's just like being a peddler. You want two breasts? Well, here you are -- two breasts. We must see to it that the man looking at the picture has at hand everything he needs to paint a nude. If you really give him everything he needs -- and the best -- he'll put everything where it belongs, with his own eyes. Each person will make for himself the kind of nude he wants, with the nude that I will have made for him.
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Critics, mathematicians, scientists and busybodies want to classify everything, marking the boundaries and limits... In art, there is room for all possibilities.
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Almost every evening, either I went to [Georges] Braque's studio or Braque came to mine. Each of us had to see what the other had done during the day. We criticized each other's work. A canvas wasn't finished unless both of us felt it was.
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It's a poor artist who borrows--a good artist steals.
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Forcing yourself to use restricted means is the sort of restraint that liberates invention. It obliges you to make a kind of progress that you can't even imagine in advance.
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I treat paintings as I treat objects. If a window in a picture looks wrong, I close it and draw the curtains, just as I would do in my own room.
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You must always work not just within but below your means. If you can handle three elements, handle only two. If you can handle ten, then handle only five. In that way the ones you do handle, you handle with more ease, more mastery, and you create a feeling of strength in reserve.