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Painting Quotes

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Painting Quotes

“Is there in painting an effect which arises from the being together of repose and energy in the artist's mind? - can both repose and energy be seen in a painting's line and color, plane and volume, surface and depth, detail and composition? - and is the true effect of a good painting on the spectator one that makes at once for repose and energy, calmness and intensity, serenity and stir?”

“With respect to the use of this sparkling coloured material (butterfly wings around 1955, fh) - the constituent parts of which remain indistinguishable - with the aim of producing a very vivid effect of scintillation, I realised that, for me, this responds to needs of the same order as those that formerly led me, in many drawings and paintings, to organize my lines and patches of colour so that the objects represented would meld into everything around them, so that the result would be a sort of continuous, universal soup with an intensive flavour of life.”

“Consider paint a film of light reflecting/absorbing material, and a colored paint a material which gives a particular, characteristic transmission of light via differential absorption and reflection. Call this reflected quality 'luminance' and measure it in millilamberts. This measure is as real and present as height, breadth, depth; and I find the phenomenon equally sumptuous and convincing. . . . Painted light, not color, not form, not perspective, or line, not image, or words, or equations, is painting. I make paintings which do not represent light, they are light.”

“The idea was to take fine art and put it into the location of the movie scripts. The script itself is collage - some of the lines come from actual movies and I've written others to make the text work with the found image. In this way, the details of old dead guys' paintings (from the collection of the Städel Museum in Frankfurt, where this work will be exhibited in relation to the historical paintings) become illustrations of the movie scripts. I found this mélange of high art and Hollywood amusing.”

“To my way of thinking, the concept drawings that Rembrandt did, the drawings he made that he used to model his artists, to work out the compositions of his paintings: those are cartoons. Look at his sketch for the return of the prodigal son. The expression on the angry younger brother's face. The head is down; the eyebrow is just one curved line over the eyes. It communicates in a very shorthand way. It's beautiful, expressive, and, in a peculiar way, it's more powerful than the kind of stilted, formalized expression in the final painting.”

“Someone wrote to me asking me to illustrate a missed connection that "hasn't happened yet." This guy has seen the same girl waiting at a bus stop on his morning commute for weeks, and has been trying to find a way to approach her. He thought it would be fun to put up a Missed Connections poster [of my painting] on the corner where she waits and see what happens. It is kind of an intriguing idea but there's something a bit too manipulative about it for my liking. It's a fine line between being creative and stalking!”