Arthur Boyd Quotes

Australia, Painter
July 24, 1920 – April, 24, 1999.

Arthur Merric Bloomfield Boyd AC OBE (24 July 1920 – 24 April 1999) was a leading Australian painter of the late 20th century. Boyd's work ranges from impressionist renderings of Australian landscape to starkly expressionist figuration, and many canvases feature both. Several famous works set Biblical stories against the Australian landscape, such as The Expulsion (1947–48), now at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. Having a strong social conscience, Boyd's work deals with humanitarian issues and universal themes of love, loss and shame.

I stress the uniqueness of the Australian landscape and its metaphysical and mythic content.

Arthur Boyd
- Stress
Everything I do is the environment.

Arthur Boyd
- Environment

I think it would be better if nobody owned anything, but they didn't starve. Had enough paint and enough pianos and everything else.

Arthur Boyd
We save paradise by an intense education program where you get people that you can trust to talk sanely about the environment and hope that the message will get through.

Arthur Boyd
- People
- Hope
- Education
If you can't protect yourself with talk, you won't be alive to protect yourself with guns.

Arthur Boyd
They're very nationalistic the French - or they used to be. Very insular. Pretty arrogant.

Arthur Boyd
- Pretty
If you make a gun, you are either going to sell it or you are going to use it. And if you're going to sell it, someone else is going to use it.

Arthur Boyd
- Gun
You can't make people respond.

Arthur Boyd
- People

Art doesn't alter things. It points things out, but it doesn't alter them. It can't, no matter what a painter wants to do.

Arthur Boyd
- Art