Painting Quotes - Page 46

I am metaphysical inasmuch as I am looking for a non-eloquent painting, immobile and of atmosphere, which feeds on static situations.

For many years it was difficult for me to paint because I didn't feel the informal painting that was then tyrannically dominating painters and art collectors.

Only thanks to Pop Art, my painting has become understandable.

I know how pathetically inadequate my medium [painting] is, but unfortunately I dispose of no other.

When you look at a work of art, you don't see a cover for something else; you see revelation. If you're an artist, art is the truest expression of yourself. Even if you're painting a life you don't have.

My work since the late '80s specifically questioned what was presented as the "natural" order of things in the history of post war NY painting.

I feel like it's not so much a tradition as a system that has been codified over the centuries starting in the Renaissance that applies to any painted surface. So if you're engaging in paintings, this is the language that one has to learn and is obliged to speak. I was very fortunate that I learned this language when I was a kid before I went to California, where I learned the language of attitude. Somehow the two things began to coexist.

If you go to a concert, you will notice, is it loud? Is the music fast? Is it predominately strings or brass? There are things we can all register, whether we are musicians or not. Painting's no different. Taking pleasure in projecting oneself into the painting is the act of looking. That's what looking is.

People are still making paintings. People are still enjoying paintings, looking at paintings. Paintings still have something to tell us. There's a way of being in the world that painting brings to us, that painters bring to the task that we absorb and are able to be in dialogue with. That's something that's part of us.

I have to make what I see, whether it's a painting, a table, or a movie, or it's like a death and what would be the point of that?

I like to feel like you can bite my paintings. Not to eat them, to hurt them. I like to feel like I'm painting with my teeth.

I haven't stopped painting or drawing - I've just added another medium.

I'm not going to stop painting just to take orders.

All painting, no matter what you are painting, is abstract in that it's got to be organized.

Who's going to ask a painter to see a diploma? They'd say, 'Can I see your paintings?', wouldn't they?

My only worry is the painting I'm doing. Nothing else.

My paintings are rubbish.

People used to give me pictures or paintings of me - they never look even close to what I look like.

Painting is a solitary act for me; I don't need anyone around to make paintings.

The spirit of a painting is very hard to explain and articulate. I can't say it's not intentional because that is the mark I'm trying to hit, however I don't feel I have much control over it.

Painting can be like poetry but as somebody who creates both I feel the necessity for both so they cant be that similar. Sometimes I think it's as basic as not wanting to get dirty.

What is more natural in a democratic age than that we should begin to measure the stature of a work of art-especially of a painting-by how widely and how well it is reproduced?

If you're the creative, artsy one who goes off to study painting or filmmaking, you're often seen as an outsider partly because traditionally, it has never been seen as a way to have a career.

A painting probably is the most shocking increase in value, from what it costs to make to what you sell it for.

When I used to do abstract paintings at school, like everyone else, the tutor said these would make great curtains. I would always neglect the formal stuff that was going on by using colour, because colour kind of came naturally to me.