Quote collection
437 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"It isn't up to the painter to define the symbols. Otherwise it would be better if he wrote them out in so many words! The public who look at the picture must interpret the symbols as they understand them."
"People want Art. And they are given it. But the less Art there is in painting the more painting there is."
"I love bats! Women are scared of them. They think bats can get caught in their hair, don't they? But bats are the most beautiful of animals, extraordinarily delicate. Have you observed their brilliant little eyes, gleaming with intelligence, and their skin, silky as velvet? And look at all these delicate little bones."
"To know what you’re going to draw, you have to begin drawing... When I find myself facing a blank page, that’s always going through my head. What I capture in spite of myself interests me more than my own ideas."
"All children paint like geniuses. What do we do to them that so quickly dulls this ability?"
"The artist spends the first part of his life with the dead, the second with the living, and the third with himself."
"If everybody is looking for it, then nobody is finding it. If we were cultured, we would not be conscious of lacking culture. We would regard it as something natural and would not make so much fuss about it. And if we knew the real value of this word we would be cultured enough not to give it so much importance."
"I imitate everyone except myself."
"All art is subversive."
"The connoisseur of painting gives only bad advice to the painter. For that reason I have given up trying to judge myself."
"There are chemists who spend their whole lives trying to find out what's in a lump of sugar. I want to know one thing. What is color?"
"Abstract art is only painting. And what's so dramatic about that? There is no abstract art. One must always begin with something. Afterwards one can remove all semblance of reality; there is no longer any danger as the idea of the object has left an indelible imprint."
"For my part, I can't do anything else but what I am doing."
"If I like it, I say it's mine. If I don't I say it's a fake."
"The only thing that's important is the legend created by the picture, and not whether it continues to exist itself."
"I must keep on trying, just to keep the experiment going until I get tired of it all. Even if the last result is not necessarily the best, I stop when my interest in the problem wanes."
"To me there is no past or future in my art. If a work of art cannot live always in the present it must not be considered at all. The art of the Greeks, of the Egyptians, of the great painters who lived in other times, is not an art of the past; perhaps it is more alive today than it ever was."
"How could Michelangelo have seen his David in a block of marble? Man began to make images only because he discovered them nearly formed around him, already within reach. He saw them in a bone, in the bumps of a cave, in a piece of wood. One form suggested a woman to him, another a buffalo, still another the head of a monster."
"My friends back in Barcelona called me by that name (Picasso). It was stranger, more resonant, than "Ruiz." And those are probably the reasons I adopted it. Do you know what appealed to me about that name? Well, it was undoubtedly the double s, which is fairly unusual in Spain."
"I always forbade everyone to clean my studios, dust them, not only for fear they would disturb my things, but especially because I always counted on the protection of dust. It's my ally. I always let it settle where it likes. It's like a layer of protection."