The artist one day falls through a hole in the brambles, and from that moment he is following the dark rapids of an underground river which may sometimes flow so near to the surface that the laughing picnic parties are heard above.
Art is a technique of communication. The image is the most complete technique of all communication.
One should never criticize his own work except in a fresh and hopeful mood. The self-criticism of a tired mind is suicide.
An artist cannot fail; it is a success to be one.
An artist . . . must be unprejudiced toward, or unaffected by, the actual nature of what he is observing. He sees, without self-conscious effort, beauty where superficial minds see only ugliness.
Be daring, be different, be impractical, be anything that will assert integrity of purpose and imaginative vision against the play-it-safers, the creatures of the commonplace, the slaves of the ordinary.
The very essence of the creative is its novelty, and hence we have no standard by which to judge it.
You’ve gotta be original, because if you’re like someone else, what do they need you for?
I believe that if it were left to artists to choose their own labels, most would choose none.
I’ve been called many names like perfectionist, difficult and obsessive. I think it takes obsession, takes searching for the details for any artist to be good.
What garlic is to salad, insanity is to art.
It isn’t enough to have the eyes of a gazelle, you also need the claws of a cat in order to capture your bird alive and play with it before you eat it and join its life to yours. That is the mystery of painting.
True artists are almost the only men who do their work with pleasure.
To the artist there is never anything ugly in nature.
Inside you there’s an artist you don’t know about. He’s not interested in how things look different in moonlight.
I invent nothing, I rediscover.
I choose a block of marble and chop off whatever I don’t need.
Treat a work of art like a prince. Let it speak to you first.
The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance.
There is nothing worse than a sharp image of a fuzzy concept.
Not everybody trusts paintings but people believe photographs.
When I stand before God at the end of my life, I would hope that I have not a single bit of talent left, and could say, ‘I used everything you gave me.
Art is not living. It is a use of living. The artist has the ability to take that living and use it in a certain way, and produce art.
We’re so engaged in doing things to achieve purposes of outer value that we forget that the inner value, the rapture that is associated with being alive, is what it’s all about.
I learned… that inspiration does not come like a bolt, nor is it kinetic, energetic, striving, but it comes to us slowly and quietly and all the time, though we must regularly and every day give it a little chance to start flowing, prime it with a little solitude and idleness.
When you lose simplicity, you lose drama.
You should keep on painting no matter how difficult it is, because this is all part of experience, and the more experience you can have, the better it is – unless it kills you, and then you know you have gone too far.
The purpose of art is not a rarefied, intellectual distillate – it is life, intensified, brilliant life.
Every good painter paints what he is.
Appreciate me now and avoid the rush.