Painting Quotes - Page 38

I don't understand why a Mark Rothko painting - as much as I love Mark Rothko - has to cost $73 million. I mean, I think $14 million is a pretty reasonable sum of money for a good Rothko painting. What's disturbing about this present moment is that these prices have been so out of control.

For me, the whole idea of the radically new is tied to a close reconsideration of older sources. I like to give myself over to those sources, as points of origin, in order to bring things forward. My approach requires me to internalize my sources as much as possible in the hope that new themes might emerge. The material has to be internalized in order for it to live again. Ultimately, paintings reveal themselves on the basis of what they are. They are inseparable from the physical process that goes into their making.

I'm trying to make a primitive painting. I'm trying to summon the archaic. I want to enter into a primitive situation. This is my protest against the sensory deprivation that we experience, which is due to this tendency towards globalization, towards homogenization, towards the generic - a technological standard rather than an aesthetic standard. I'm mining history, trying to regenerate a pictorial situation that is more humanistic. It's not about commodification, it's not about fitting into some sort of corporate structure. It's opposed to that direction.

Painting seems like impossibility, with only a sign now and then of its own light.

In my experience a painting is not made with colors and paint at all. I don't know what a painting is; who knows what sets off even the desire to paint?

When I see people making 'abstract' painting, I think it's just a dialogue and a dialogue isn't enough. That is to say, there is you painting and this canvas. I think there has to be a third thing; it has to be a trialogue.

I never know what it's going to look like. Wouldn't be much point in painting if I already knew the outcome. I have a subject in front of me and I start flooding colour and making marks, I don't know, it's improvisation isn't it?

I wanted to actually make people look at a painting. We don't look at paintings that much. We glance at them.

Rembrandt was way ahead of his time. It's as if he was painting an amateur theatrical, or a professional theatrical, in his studio. It's a kind of performance.

A really intelligent man makes an indifferent painter. For painting requires a certain blindness, a partial refusal to be aware of all the options.

There could be a hundred paintings in every one painting, depending on when you stop.

One of the problems with technology is that no photograph, as superb and outstanding as it may be, will ever be as satisfying as the most middle-rate painting.

The only thing I can say is consistent in all my paintings is vivid color.

I did do, well before Pop Art, all the cartoon characters as paintings.

I wish to die painting.

Painting is founded on the heart controlled by the head.

I had gone to Paris to immerse myself in painting and I came back wholly involved in words and rhythms.

Painting is an object, but it's also a voice. I don't see them as objects; I see them as voices.

Even if the painting is green, well then! The 'subject' is the green. There is always a subject; it's a joke to suppress the subject, it's impossible.

Painting taught literature to describe.

Generally paintings are about technique, but I don't see myself as a painter. I am more of a storyteller and an image - maker.

I have friends come over and we read plays out loud and I make paintings and I just do things all the time just so I don't ever feel like I'm sitting around.

Using painting as a metaphor for consciousness is what I'm interested in.

There are absences, but there are also presences. It's about how painting can evolve its own abstractions. I didn't know the painting was going to be about that, but it has to have that journey; I have to learn something, I have to end up somewhere I didn't expect to be, otherwise, I don't think it's painting.

The paintings are kind of set in the past, present, and future all at once.