Famous quotes by Artists

"I think of my peace paintings as one long poem, with each painting being a single stanza"

"Some people like to paint trees. I like to paint love. I find it more meaningful than painting trees"

"I was the least Pop of all the Pop artists"

"We all know that art is not truth. Art is lie that makes us realise truth"

"I never had the exposure to techniques and so forth that children have today with art workshops, but I always had crayons and pencils and still have work going right back to when I was five or six years old"

"I've always been fascinated by numbers. Before I was seventeen years old, I had lived in twenty-one different houses. In my mind, each of those houses had a number"

"Many, many of my paintings have come from the first chapter of Moby Dick"

"I realize that protest paintings are not exactly in vogue, but I've done many"

"Painting is, I think, inevitably an archaic activity and one that depends on spiritual values"

"Computers are useless. They can only give you answers"

"Occasionally I have come across a last patch of snow on top of a mountain in late May or June. There's something very powerful about finding snow in summer"

"The beautiful is in nature, and it is encountered under the most diverse forms of reality. Once it is found it belongs to art, or rather to the artist who discovers it"

"I work with nature, although in completely new terms"

"Painters have always needed a sort of veil upon which they can focus their attention. It's as though the more fully the consciousness is absorbed, the greater the freedom of the spirit behind"

"In my earlier paintings, I wanted the space between the picture plane and the spectator to be active"

"As a painter today you have to work without that essential platform. But if one does not deceive oneself and accepts this lack of certainty, other things may come into play"

"I used to build up to sensation, accumulating tension until it released a perceptual experience"

"I think this lack of a center has something to do with the loss of certainties that Christianity had to offer"

"For me nature is not landscape, but the dynamism of visual forces"

"Painting is just another way of keeping a diary"

"I'm cautious about using fire. It can become theatrical. I am interested in the heat, not the flames"

"I have worked with this red all over the world - in Japan, California, France, Britain, Australia - a vein running round the earth. It has taught me about the flow, energy and life that connects one place with another"

"I am not a performer but occasionally I deliberately work in a public context. Some sculptures need the movement of people around them to work"

"People do not realise that many of my works are done in urban places. I was brought up on the edge of Leeds, five miles from the city centre-on one side were fields and on the other, the city"

"I have walked around the same streets so many times, and then seen a place that had been hidden to me. I now know the sites in a way that makes me think I could have made better use of the connections between place and snowball"

"It takes between three and six hours to make each snowball, depending on snow quality. Wet snow is quick to work with but also quick to thaw, which can lead to a tense journey to the cold store"

"The sincere friends of this world are as ship lights in the stormiest of nights"

"The human heart is as a frail craft on which we wish to reach the stars"

"Take pleasure in your dreams; relish your principles and drape your purest feelings on the heart of a precious lover"

"Rome is the city of echoes, the city of illusions, and the city of yearning"