Quote collection
48 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"The painter makes real to others his innermost feelings about all that he cares for. A secret becomes known to everyone who views the picture through the intensity with which it is felt."
"Painting is sometimes like those recipes where you do all manner of elaborate things to a duck, and then end up putting it on one side and only using the skin."
"The longer you look at an object, the more abstract it becomes, and, ironically, the more real."
"What do I ask of a painting? I ask it to astonish, disturb, seduce, convince."
"The aura given out by a person or object is as much a part of them as their flesh. The effect that they make in space is as bound up with them as might be their colour or smell ... Therefore the painter must be as concerned with the air surrounding his subject as with the subject itself. It is through observation and perception of atmosphere that he can register the feeling that he wishes his painting to give out."
"Everything is autobiographical and everything is a portrait."
"Full, saturated colours have an emotional significance I want to avoid."
"The aura given out by a person or object is as much a part of them as their flesh."
"It is the only point of getting up every morning: to paint, to make something good, to make something even better than before, not to give up, to compete, to be ambitious."
"I've always wanted to create drama in my pictures, which is why I paint people. It's people who have brought drama to pictures from the beginning. The simplest human gestures tell stories."
"I don't want any colour to be noticeable... I don't want it to operate in the modernist sense as colour, something independent... Full, saturated colours have an emotional significance I want to avoid."
"I remember Francis Bacon would say that he felt he was giving art what he thought it previously lacked. With me, it's what Yeats called the fascination with what's difficult. I'm only trying to do what I can't do."
"I paint people, not because of what they are like, not exactly in spite of what they are like, but how they happen to be."
"Sometimes, when I've been staring too hard, I've noticed that I could see the circumference of my own eye."
"The character of the artist doesn't enter into the nature of the art. Eliot said that art is the escape from personality, which I think is right. We know that Velázquez embezzled money from the Spanish court and wanted power and so on, but you can't see this in his art."
"Were it not for this [dissatisfaction], the perfect painting might be painted, on the completion of which the painter could retire. It is this great insufficiency that drives him on. The process of creation becomes necessary to the painter perhaps more than it is in the picture. The process is in fact habit-forming."
"I would wish my portraits to be of the people, not like them. Not having a look of the sitter, being them."
"The only way I could work properly was by using the absolute maximum of observation and concentration that I could possible muster."
"A painter's tastes must grow out of what so obsesses him in life that he never has to ask himself what it is suitable for him to do in art."
"The model should only serve the very private function for the painter of providing the starting point for his excitement"