Famous quotes by Artists

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

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

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

"His failures are as valuable as his successes: by misjudging one thing he conforms something else, even if at the time he does not know what that something else is"

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

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

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

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

"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"

"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"

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

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

"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"

"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"

"Creative thinking inspires ideas. Ideas inspire change"

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

"Before the reward there must be labor. You plant before you harvest. You sow in tears before you reap joy"

"As the artist picks his way along, rejecting and accepting as he goes, certain patterns of enquiry emerge"

"An artist's early work is inevitably made up of a mixture of tendencies and interests, some of which are compatible and some of which are in conflict"

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

"Focusing isn't just an optical activity, it is also a mental one"

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

"There was a time when meanings were focused and reality could be fixed; when that sort of belief disappeared, things became uncertain and open to interpretation"

"I want to paint big, bright, optimistic pictures of the place I love"

"I still take photographs for my own use, personal studies. I do not feel that I can fully express my views through the medium and this is why I have moved towards painting"

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

"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"

"Life is a series of steps. Things are done gradually. Once in a while there is a giant step, but most of the time we are taking small, seemingly insignificant steps on the stairway of life"