Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Trying to be original is futile. If you have no place to go, stay home and cook.
Art is making something better without knowing what better is until you make it.
We must turn away from work that replaces experience and pleasure with explanation.
Good new art may not look like art. Inspiration doesn't follow style, it creates it.
If you learn something too well, it will get in the way of your perception of reality.
The power of art is not in communication but effect; what it does, not what it relates.
In art there is no absolute good or bad, but it is absolute that there is good and bad.
Good art, no matter how simple or casual-seeming, always carries a high density of choice.
If art depended on content, then one painting of an apple would be as good as the next one.
Art may be for the privileged few but they have earned the privilege and deny it to no one.
Good art looks new because the artist has recombined something old to make something better.
Art makes you reinvent the wheel with regularity. If you don't, art gets bored and slips away.
Very few people ever understand art. If you are lucky, they will buy it for the wrong reasons.
Don't apologize, justify or rationalize bad art or bad writing. If you do, you are part of it.
Experience is real. Painting, which comes out of experience, is real. The world is an illusion.
Start a painting with fresh ideas, and then let the painting replace your ideas with its ideas.
When you are painting a landscape, assume the painting is real and the landscape is an illusion.
A clear idea about the nature of quality in art will always result in inferior art tailored to it.
Great art does not break with the past. It breaks with the present by emulating the best of the past.
It matters little if something is 'craft' or 'art.' The question is only this: does it give me pleasure?
The more freedom artists have to do what they want to do, the more they do what other artists are doing.
Conceptual art' is an oxymoron. Concepts are articulations of fact or supposition, not attributes of quality.
Postmodernism lives in the academy, where words abandon reality to serve ambition, and reputations rise on hot air.
Whether something is called art is beside the point. What counts is what happens when you ask it to actually be art.
Talent is like a seed which needs fertile soil. There is no less talent now, there is less fertile soil to nourish it.
Good art has everything you need to know about it in the work, not on a wall label. Art is here to take us beyond language.
Craft' gets a bad rap. Mediocre art is not caused by craft; it is caused by artists. Good art employs whatever craft works best.
Stale artifacts of the past' are always 'active components of the present moment' when they are experienced in the present moment.
Postmodernism does not facilitate better art. It rationalizes inferior art by wrapping it in words - a suit of armor with nobody inside.
When you have made a good painting, don't do another like it, but remember the process, what you did, what you were thinking and feeling.
Limitation of means is a precondition of excellence. Creative freedom chooses its limitations. Destructive freedom rejects them heedlessly.
No high-minded painter of the last fifty years has been able to come to terms with his art without coming to terms with the problem of cubism.
Science is a matter of adjusting language to explain material reality. Art is a matter of adjusting material reality to create a sense of life.
The struggle to be original hates conformity, but the struggle to be better disregards it, or takes advantage of it to build workable conventions.
If we see an object as a bowl, it may inhibit seeing it as craft, just as seeing it as craft might inhibit seeing it as art. See first; name later.
What is sublime? / the artist said. / I haven't time / to be well read. / To be sub lime / I'll place, instead, / green citrus fruit / upon my head.
To an art historian a Giotto is a 14th Century painting. To an artist it was painted yesterday. We free ourselves from the past when we see it freshly.
Purplish brown? Let's agree it / is a color so bad we all flee it / it has no good use / so let's name it Puce / from the sound we make when we see it.
Postmodernism does not help us understand good art. It encourages art that can be easily understood and throws in something catchy to cover the loss of mystery.
Art flows more easily when you are not thinking about what 'should' be in it or how it 'should' be done. The Impressionists taught us to look and see, not assume.
When realistic images or patterns are seen in an abstract painting, they are often parallels brought about by processes in painting which echo processes in nature.
Many years ago, Clement Greenberg said, 'All profoundly original work looks ugly at first.' This should be updated now to 'All profoundly ugly work looks original at first.
Truth is not always hard to find; it is often staring you in the face. The problem with truth is that it is hard to believe. It is even harder to get other people to believe.
When anyone can produce dreck or publish gibberish, and not only get away with it but be celebrated for it, the discipline is no longer a discipline, and it will get no respect.
Art is like a butterfly fluttering in a meadow. Analysis of art is like a butterfly on a pin. Each has its value, but we must always be aware of the difference, and what is gained or lost.
Of course I will look at anything, but I have not got the time or the patience to keep on looking at art that I know could be better. I don't want art that needs fixing, I want art that sends me back to the studio to fix my own.
When you write something new about science, other scientists may not like it but they pay attention because it is subject to proof. When you write something new about art, it is subject only to the reader's discomfort, and will probably be rejected.
Art is too popular. If plumbing was as popular as art is we would have amateur plumbers running around brandishing wrenches and Roto-Rooters, climbing in and out of sewers and writing gibberish about pipe systems. And none of our our toilets would work.