A la pointe de mon pinceau, il m'arrive - je vis pour ces moments-là - d'inventer un trait. Douceur, partage : reconnaître un trait !
PAINTING, n: The art of protecting flat surfaces from the weather and exposing them to the critic.
If the work begins to look labored or inferior, drastic action is taken. I destroy the offending painting with wild swathes of paint. Most satisfying! What comes out of this spent energy is often an excellent painting.
The fine art of painting, which is the bastard of alchemy, always has been always will be, a game. The rules of the game are quite simple: in a given arena, on as many psychic fronts as the talent allows, one must visually describe, the centre of the meaning of existense.
First I saw the mountains in the painting; then I saw the painting in the mountains.
I build a painting by putting little marks together--some look like hot dogs, some like doughnuts.
I perhaps owe having become a painter to flowers.
Painting is very easy when you don't know how, but very difficult when you do.
A painting requires a little mystery, some vagueness, some fantasy. When you always make your meaning perfectly plain you end up boring people
Only when he no longer knows what he is doing does the painter do good things.
No longer shall I paint interiors with men reading and women knitting. I will paint living people who breather and feel and suffer and love.
Then very slowly I go to slightly lighter colors until little by little, the forms begin to take shape and I start to see what is happening. Since I never plan in advance but rather, simply let myself be led by instinct, and taste and intuition. And it is in this manner that I find myself creating visions that I have never before imagined. And little by little certain color effects develop that excite me and I find the painting itself leading me on and I become only an instrument of a greater, wiser force...or being...or intelligence than I myself am.
There is nothing harder to learn than painting and nothing which most people take less trouble about learning. An art school is a place where about three people work with feverish energy and everybody else idles to a degree that I should have conceived unattainable by human nature.
I paint German artists whom I admire. I paint their pictures, their work as painters, and their portraits too. But oddly enough, each of these portraits ends up as a picture of a woman with blonde hair. I myself have never been able to work out why this happens
Painting is an attempt to come to terms with life. There are as many solutions as there are human beings.
To explain away the mystery of a great painting-- if such a feat were possible-- would be irreparable harm. . . . If there is no mystery then there is no 'poetry'.
I found I could say things with color and shapes that I couldn't say any other way - things I had no words for.
So I said to myself-I'll paint what I see-what the flower is to me but I'll paint it big and they will be surprised into taking the time to look at it. I will make even busy New Yorkers take time to see what I see of flowers.
Instinct must be thwarted just as one prunes the branches of a tree so that it will grow better.
Every good painter paints what he is.
The painting has a life of its own.
Painting or poetry is made as one makes love - a total embrace, prudence thrown to the winds, nothing held back.
Everytime I paint a portrait I lose a friend.
In fact, whatever exists in the universe, in essence, in appearance, in the imagination, the painter has first in his mind and then in his hands … it lies in his power to create them . . .
Since the model he so faithfully copies is not going to be hung up next to the picture ... it is of no interest whether it is an accurate copy of the model. Whether it will convince or not, depends entirely on what it is in itself, what is there to be seen. The model should only serve the very private function for the painter of providing the starting point for his excitement. The picture is all he feels about it, all he thinks worth preserving of it, all he invests it with. If all the qualities which a painter took from the model for his picture were really taken, no person could be painted twice.
To me, a painter, if not the most useful, is the least harmful member of our society.
Look, it's my misery that I have to paint this kind of painting, it's your misery that you have to love it, and the price of the misery is thirteen hundred and fifty dollars.
It is a widely accepted notion among painters that it does not matter what one paints as long as it is well painted. This is the essence of academicism. There is no such thing as good painting about nothing.
Painting is not for me either decorative amusement, or the plastic invention of felt reality; it must be every time: invention, discovery, revelation.
Whenever I see a Frans Hals I feel like painting, but when I see a Rembrandt I feel like giving up!
Every painting is a war. You have to struggle every day, and to struggle every day with your inadequacies is a damn nuisance.
Painting is just another way of keeping a diary.
Painting is stronger than I am. It can make me do whatever it wants.
Painting is a blind man's profession. He paints not what he sees, but what he feels, what he tells himself about what he has seen.
I am the primitive of the way I have discovered.
Life obliges me to do something, so I paint.
When I am halfway there with a painting, it can occasionally be thrilling… But it happens very rarely; usually it's agony… I go to great pains to mask [the agony]. But the struggle is there. It's the invisible enemy.
It is not the language of painters but the language of nature which one should listen to, the feeling for the things themselves, for reality, is more important than the feeling for pictures.
Painting is a faith, and it imposes the duty to disregard public opinion.
The emotions are sometimes so strong that I work without knowing it. The strokes come like speech.
If you hear a voice within you say "you cannot paint," then by all means paint, and that voice will be silenced.
Once, after finishing a picture, I thought I would stop for awhile, take a trip, do things--the next time I thought of this, I found five years had gone by.
You cannot paint the "Mona Lisa" by assigning one dab each to a thousand painters.
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Each great branch of art calls upon a different temperament. Painting and poetry more than all others invite the solitary nature. . . . Probably all important artists belong to this functionally lonely class. Only occasionally does the artist appear as a rebel, as in the sixteenth and in the nineteenth centuries. More commonly he has been a courtier, a part of the household of the prince, and entertainer, whose work was valued like that of any other entertainer, and whose function was to amuse more than to disquiet the audience. Today the artist is neither a rebel nor an entertainer. To be a rebel requires more effort away from his work than the artist wants to make. The entertainers have formed professional guilds in those many categories of public amusement from which the artist is now almost completely excluded. Only the playwright still functions both as an artist and as an entertainer. More lonely than ever, the artist today is like Dedalus, the strange artificer of wonderful and frightening surprises for his immediate circle.
