Painting Quotes
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My best training came from doing illustrations because it taught me to compose my paintings more effectively, to improve my colors, and to be ruthlessly selective.
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Since childhood, I have been painting, for no special reason, numerous dots and nets, drawing from the hallucinations that seem to appear endlessly. I can't explain why if you ask me.
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And in a picture I want to say something comforting, as music is comforting.
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People want Art. And they are given it. But the less Art there is in painting the more painting there is.
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Painting for me is like a fabric, all of a piece and uniform, with one set of threads as the representational, esthetic element, and the cross-threads as the technical, architectural, or abstract element. These threads are interdependent and complementary, and if one set is lacking the fabric does not exist. A picture with no representational purpose is to my mind always an incomplete technical exercise, for the only purpose of any picture is to achieve representation.
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You were a painting by Matisse, but you took sleeping pills.
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When I'm painting outdoors, I only have time to think about what I'm saying, not how I'm saying it.
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In traditional Asian arts, the word and the picture always sit next to each other. I have an aunt, a Chinese brush painter, who told me that when you do a Chinese brush painting, you have to pair the image up with some poetry.
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I have all my subjects to hand. I go back and look at them. I take notes. Then I go home. And before I start painting I reflect, I dream.
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Painting is the frozen evidence of a performance.
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In film, you're painting a canvas. I got really excited about that.
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Half or more of the best new work in the last few years has been neither painting nor sculpture. Usually it has been related, closely or distantly, to one or the other. The work is diverse, and much in it that is not in painting and sculpture is also diverse. But there are some things that occur nearly in common.
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The painting never changes once I've started to paint it. I work things out before-hand in the sketches.
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The different styles I have been using in my art must not be seen as an evolution, or as steps towards an unknown ideal of painting. Everything I have ever made was made for the present and with the hope that it would always remain in the present.
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However, new plasticism is pure painting in contrast with the opinion of Theo van Doesburg, then: the means of expression still are form and color, though these are completely interiorized; the straight line and flat color remain purely pictorial means of expression.
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Most people don't like to be confronted with an actual fact-of-life because it's difficult to metabolize. A painting of a bowl of fruit is much easier. It's for the same reason why we don't like going to the doctor. The diagnosis and x-rays are too honest. This is what creates the perception that contemporary art is shocking or suspicious.
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I believe the reason I love painting so much is that it forces one to be objective.
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For me, painting is a way to forget life. It is a cry in the night, a strangled laugh.
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The world concerns me only in so far as I have a certain debt and duty to it, because I have lived in it for thirty years and owe to it to leave behind some souvenir in the shape of drawings and paintings – not done to please any particular movement, but within which a genuine human sentiment is expressed.
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If you understand a painting beforehand, you might as well not paint it.
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Ever since I started painting, I have tried to get the fluidity and surprise of image connection, the simultaneity of film montage, into painting.
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I was dishwasher, then promoted to chef in a local kitchen in a restaurant in Seattle, and I was working on a building site as well, putting in insulation and painting houses, and then doing some classes at a community college nearby.
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There is neither painting, nor sculpture, nor music, nor poetry. The only truth is creation.
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Photography is the very conscience of painting. It constantly reminds the later of what it must not do.
