Pablo Picasso Quotes - Page 10

Rhythm is a perception of time... when drawing, the tiredness of the hand is a rhythm.

If I had known there was such a thing as Islamic Calligraphy, I would never have started to paint. I have strived to reach the highest levels of artistic mastery, but I found that Islamic Calligraphy was there ages before I was.

A picture is not thought out and settled beforehand. While it is being done it changes as one's thoughts change.

What I capture in spite of myself interests me more than my own ideas.

The academic teaching on beauty is false. We have been misled, but so completely misled that we can no longer find so much as a shadow of a truth again. The beauties of the Parthenon, the Venuses, the Nymphs, the Narcisusses, are so may lies. Art is not the application of a canon of beauty, but what the instinct and the brain can conceive independently of that canon.

A picture lives by its legend - not by anything else.

I paint objects as I think them, not as I see them.

If I could say this I wouldn't have to paint.

All Children are Artists

Anything new, anything worth doing, can't be recognized.

In art, there is neither past nor future. The art that is not in the present will never be.

I hate it when people pilfer my things.

What might be taken for a precocious genius is the genius of childhood. When the child grows up, it disappears without a trace. It may happen that this boy will become a real painter some day, or even a great painter. But then he will have to begin everything again, from zero.

I have never had time for the idea of searching. Whenever I wanted to express something, I did so without thinking of the past or the future.

It's a poor artist who borrows--a good artist steals.

What other movement determines the S line? Its aesthetic efficacity has long been noted by artists.

I want to know one thing, what is color?

To me there is no past or future in art. If a work of art does not live in the present, it must not be considered at all.

The urge to destroy is also a creative urge.

Everybody has the same energy potential. The average person wastes his in a dozen little ways. I bring mine to bear on one thing only: my paintings, and everything else is sacrificed to it...myself included.

It's not what the artist does that counts; it's what he is.

How often have I found that wanting to use blue, I didn't have it so I used a red instead of the blue.

When I paint a woman in an armchair, the armchair is there to show illness and death-or as a protection.

Abstract art is only painting. And what's so dramatic about that? There is no abstract art. One must always begin with something. Afterwards one can remove all semblance of reality; there is no longer any danger as the idea of the object has left an indelible imprint.

Sculpture is the art of the intelligence.