Quotes on Painting

I like to write about painting because I think visually. I see my writing as blocks of color before it forms itself. I think I also care about painting because I'm not musical. Painting to me is not a metaphor for writing, but something people do that can never be reduced to words.

I'd like to live as a poor man with lots of money.

By attracting attention to yourself, you distract people from the movie. Ideally, you like a movie to speak for itself. You don't describe a song before you sing it or tell about a painting before you show it. You don't reveal the recipe before you serve the dish. You taste it.

Sculpture is something you bump into when you back up to look at a painting.

Our experience of any painting is always the latest line in a long conversation we've been having with painting. There's no way of looking at art as though you hadn't seen art before.

I don't want the viewer to be able to peel away the layers of my painting like the layers of an onion and find that all the blues are on the same level.

Photography is about finding things. And painting is different - it's about making something.

Landscape is to American painting what sex and psychoanalysis are to the American novel.

I think most people gain some sense of how to look at a painting, but no one ever teaches you how to look at a piece of silver.

'Art or anti-art?' was the question I asked when I returned from Munich in 1912 and decided to abandon pure painting or painting for its own sake. I thought of introducing elements alien to painting as the only way out of a pictorial and chromatic dead end.

Painting is a language of its own. You cannot interpret one form of expression with another form of expression.

A painting that doesn't shock isn't worth painting.

Painting is a science, and should be pursued as an inquiry into the laws of nature.

Painting is but another word for feeling.

Money has lost its narrative quality the way painting did once upon a time. Money is talking to itself.

Long looking at paintings is equivalent to being dropped into a foreign city, where gradually, out of desire and despair, a few key words, then a little syntax make a clearing in the silence. Art... is a foreign city, and we deceive ourselves when we think it familiar... We have to recognize that the language of art, all art, is not our mother-tongue.

I'd asked around 10 or 15 people for suggestions. Finally one lady friend asked the right question, 'Well, what do you love most?' That's how I started painting money.

The need to make music, and to listen to it, is universally expressed by human beings. I cannot imagine, even in our most primitive times, the emergence of talented painters to make cave paintings without there having been, near at hand, equally creative people making song. It is, like speech, a dominant aspect of human biology.

Ah, lives of men! When prosperous they glitter - Like a fair picture; when misfortune comes - A wet sponge at one blow has blurred the painting.

The most remarkable discovery made by scientists is science itself. The discovery must be compared in importance with the invention of cave-painting and of writing. Like these earlier human creations, science is an attempt to control our surroundings by entering into them and understanding them from inside. And like them, science has surely made a critical step in human development which cannot be reversed. We cannot conceive a future society without science.

Painting is the passage from the chaos of the emotions to the order of the possible.