Quote collection
437 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"I hate that aesthetic game of the eye and the mind, played by these connoisseurs, these mandarins who "appreciate" beauty. What is beauty, anyway? There's no such thing. I never "appreciate," any more than I "like." I love it or I hate."
"When they say that I am too old to make a thing, I try to make it immediately."
"Style is often something which locks the painter into the same vision, the same technique, the same formula during years and years, sometimes during one's whole lifetime."
"As an artist, all I need is my paints and brushes - and someone to drag me away when the canvas is done"
"When one starts from a portrait and seeks by successive eliminations to find pure form... one inevitably ends up with an egg."
"Neither is there figurative and non-figurative art. All things appear to us in the shape of forms. Even in metaphysics ideas are expressed by forms. Well then, think how absurd it would be to think of painting without the imagery of forms. A figure, an object, a circle, are forms; they affect us more or less intensely."
"One starts to get young at the age of sixty and then it is too late."
"Motivation is in the world around us. We have an infinite amount of material at our disposal, in the lives of those we meet, in what we see and feel, in what we discuss and from the passion of every woman."
"If you have five elements available use only four. If you have four elements use three."
"I see for others... in order to put on canvas the sudden apparitions which come to me."
"To copy others is necessary, but to copy oneself is pathetic."
"I simply painted images of what was before my eyes; it is for others to find hidden meaning in them."
"The quality of a painter depends on the amount of past he carries with him."
"If you are trying to find something, it means you haven't got it. And if you find it simply by looking for it, that means it's false."
"While I am working I am not conscious of what I am putting on the canvas."
"If you're stuck in a painting, then stop and draw something else. Draw a flower and put your love into that flower. Then your powers will come back again."
"In art intentions are not sufficient and, as we say in Spanish, love must be proved by deeds and not by reasons. What one does is what counts and not what one had the intention of doing."
"We must pick out what is good for us where we can find it."
"You can go to the moon or walk under the sea, or anything else you like, but painting remains painting because it eludes such investigation. It remains there like a question. And it alone gives the answer."
"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."