Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Photography has always been a major part of my vision: my excuse for meddling with what the world looks like.
I was much happier when I had less responsibility... when my only responsibility was to my work and to myself.
I like photographs of anything uninteresting. Maybe just two doors on a wall... The point is to be uninteresting.
If you don't have trouble paying the rent, you have trouble doing something else; one needs just a certain amount of trouble.
Sometimes I have taken photographs and just felt so excited that I could barely hold the camera steady, and the photo was boring.
I'm quite taken aback when I get something that appears to be technically a good photograph, because it's not necessarily my intention.
But I was in awe of the painters; I mean I was new in New York, and I thought the painting that was going on here was just unbelievable
But I was in awe of the painters; I mean I was new in New York, and I thought the painting that was going on here was just unbelievable.
You wait until life is in the frame, then you have the permission to click. I like the adventure of waiting until the whole frame is full.
You can't make either life or art, you have to work in the hole in between, which is undefined. That's what makes the adventure of painting.
I don't think of myself as making art. I do what I do because I want to, because painting is the best way I've found to get along with myself.
Most artists try to break your heart, or they accidentally break their own hearts.But I find the quietness in the ordinary much more satisfying.
A newspaper that you're not reading can be used for anything; and the same people didn't think it was immoral to wrap their garbage in newspaper.
By the time you establish your priorities, there really isn't any fun or need to interest yourself in what you're doing. And this I find disastrous.
Very quickly a painting is turned into a facsimile of itself when one becomes so familiar with with it that one recognizes it without looking at it.
It's when you've found out how to do certain things, that it's time to stop doing them, because what's missing is that you're not including the risk.
I don't think any one person, whether artist or not, has been given permission by anyone to put the responsibility of the way things are on anyone else
I don't think any one person, whether artist or not, has been given permission by anyone to put the responsibility of the way things are on anyone else.
There was a whole language that I could never make function for myself in relationship to painting and that was attitudes like tortured, struggle, pain.
There was a whole language that I could never make function for myself in relationship to painting, and that was attitudes like tortured, struggle, pain.
Painting is always strongest when in spite of composition, color, etc., it appears as a fact, or an inevitability, as opposed to a souvenir or arrangement.
And I think that even today, New York still has more of this unexpected quality around every corner than any place else. It's something quite extraordinary
And I think that even today, New York still has more of this unexpected quality around every corner than any place else. It's something quite extraordinary.
I don't really trust ideas - especially good ones... Rather, I put my trust in the materials that confront me, because they put me in touch with the unknown.
I did a twenty foot print and John Cage is involved in that because he was the only person I knew in New York who had a car and who would be willing to do this.
I think that in the last twenty years or so, there's been a new kind of honesty in painting where painters have been very proud of paint and have let it behave openly.
It's so easy to be undisciplined. And to be disciplined is so against my character, my general nature anyway, that I have to strain a little bit to keep on the right track.
With me, it's much more a matter of accepting whatever happens, accepting all these elements from the outside and then trying to work with them in a sort of free collaboration.
It is neither Art for Art, nor Art against Art. I am for Art, but for Art that has nothing to do with Art. Art has everything to do with life, but it has nothing to do with Art.
And also the new excitement and variety of ways that the abstract expressionists were applying paint. You could put it on as though it were colored air and it would be painting.
I usually work in a direction until I know how to do it, then I stop, At the time that I am bored or understand - I use those words interchangeably - another appetite has formed.
I am sick of talking about What and Why I am doing. I have always believed that the WORK is the word. Action is seen less clearly through reason. There are no shortcuts to directness.
So that ideas of sort of relaxed symmetry have been something for years that I have been concerned with because I think that symmetry is a neutral shape as opposed to a form of design.
Steichen bought my first photographs that I ever sold. He recognized the style from the school of Black Mountain. After that, it was about twenty years before I sold another photograph.
I always have a good reason for taking something out but I never have one for putting something in. And I don't want to, because that means that the picture is being painted predigested.
I used to think of that line in Allen Ginsberg's 'Howl', about the 'sad cup of coffee'.. ..I have had cold coffee and hot coffee and lousy coffee, But I've never had a sad cup of coffee.
I'm not so facile that I can accomplish or find out what I want to know or explore enough of the possibilities and a way of making a painting, say, in just one painting or two paintings.
Even at this late date, I go into my studio, and I think 'Is this going to be it? Is it the end?' You see, nearly everything terrorizes me. When an artist loses that terror, he's through.
I had been working purely abstractly for so long, it was important for me to see whether I was working abstractly because I couldn't work any other way, or whether I was doing it out of choice.
I think maybe chance works better in a situation like music because music exists over a period of time, and you don't maintain constantly the you can't refer back from one area to another area.
I really feel sorry for people who think things like soap dishes or mirrors or Coke bottles are ugly, because they're surrounded by things like that all day long, and it must make them miserable.
The only thing that I could get with chance, and I never was able to use it, was that I would end up with something quite geometric or the spirit that I was interested in, indulging in, was gone.
One can see that a canvas is six feet by eight feet, say, quite accurately. But you can spend two minutes and think it's five, or thirty seconds and it's just a different bed for activities there.
Well, I like way downtown near the Battery. I lived down there at this time and for, I guess, the following well, this is where I moved to uptown and I've been here for four years and this is 1965.
I never allowed myself the luxury of those brilliant, beautiful colors until I went to India and saw people walking around in them or dragging them in the mud. I realised they were not so artificial.
There's a moment for everyone when you fall into your own shadow and the fact is that it's your shadow and you're forced to live in it. And this is nothing to celebrate or not celebrate. It simply is.
Anything you do will be an abuse of somebody else's aesthetics. I think you're born an artist or not. I couldn't have learned it. And I hope I never do because knowing more only encourages your limitations.
People ask me, 'Don't you ever run out of ideas?' In the first place I don't use ideas. Every time I have an idea it's too limiting, and usually turns out to be a disappointment. But I haven't run out of curiosity.
People ask me, 'Don't you ever run out of ideas?' Well, on the first place, I don't use ideas. Every time I have an idea, it's too limiting and usually turns out to be a disappointment. But I haven't run out of curiosity.
And all of this, all these physical aspects of painting at that time excited me very much. You could do a picture in just black and white. I mean all the things, whether you're soliciting permission or not, do give you permission