Joan Miro Quotes

A simple line painted with the brush can lead to freedom and happiness.

To gain freedom is to gain simplicity.

If you have any notion of where you are going, you will never get anywhere.

The painting rises from the brushstrokes as a poem rises from the words. The meaning comes later.

You can look at a picture for a week and never think of it again. You can also look at the picture for a second and think of it all your life.

I try to apply colors like words that shape poems, like notes that shape music.

When I stand before a canvas, I never know what I'll do, and I am the first one surprised at what comes out.

What I am seeking... is a motionless movement, something equivalent to what is called the eloquence of silence.

More important than a work of art itself is what it will sow. Art can die, a painting can disappear. What counts is the seed.

Poetry and painting are done in the same way you make love; it's an exchange of blood, a total embrace - without caution, without any thought of protecting yourself.

The simplest things give me ideas.

Painting must be fertile. It must give birth to a world.. ..it must fertilize the imagination.

The works must be conceived with fire in the soul but executed with clinical coolness.

I think of my studio as a vegetable garden, where things follow their natural course. They grow, they ripen. You have to graft. You have to water.

I make no distinction between poetry and painting.

I believe that to do anything in this world one needs a love for risk and adventure, and above all, to be able to do without what middle-class families call "future."

For me an object is something living. This cigarette or this box of matches contains a secret life much more intense than that of certain human beings.

The more I work, the more I want to work.

Never, never do I set to work on a canvas in the state it comes in from the shop. I provoke accidents - a form, a splotch of color. Any accident is good enough. I let the matiere decide. Then I prepare a ground by, for example, wiping my brushes on the canvas. Letting fall some drops of turpentine on it would do just as well. If I want to make a drawing I crumple the sheet of paper or I wet it; the flowing water traces a line and this line may suggest what is to come next.

The spectacle of the sky overwhelms me. Im overwhelmed when I see, in an immense sky, the crescent of the moon, or the sun. There, in my pictures, tiny forms in huge empty spaces. Empty spaces, empty horizons, empty plains - everything which is bare has always greatly impressed me.

The more ignoble I find life, the more strongly I react by contradiction, in humour and in an outburst of liberty and expansion.

For me, a painting must give off sparks. It must dazzle like the beauty of a woman or a poem.

Painting or poetry is made as one makes love - a total embrace, prudence thrown to the winds, nothing held back.

I feel the need of attaining the maximum of intensity with the minimum of means. It is this which has led me to give my painting a character of even greater bareness.

The picture should be fecund. It must bring a world to birth.