Top 22 Quotes & Sayings by Alice Neel

Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American artist Alice Neel.

Last updated on December 24, 2024.

Alice Neel was an American visual artist, who was known for her portraits depicting friends, family, lovers, poets, artists, and strangers. Her paintings have an expressionistic use of line and color, psychological acumen, and emotional intensity. Her work depicts women through a female gaze, illustrating them as being consciously aware of the objectification by men and the demoralizing effects of the male gaze. Her work contradicts and challenges the traditional and objectified nude depictions of women by her male predecessors. She pursued a career as a figurative painter during a period when abstraction was favored, and she did not begin to gain critical praise for her work until the 1960s. Neel was called "one of the greatest portrait artists of the 20th century" by Barry Walker, curator of modern and contemporary art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, which organized a retrospective of her work in 2010.

American - Artist | January 28, 1900 - October 13, 1984

Source: Wikipedia

You can't leave humanity out. If you didn't have humanity, you wouldn't have anything.

Alice Neel

I paint; I'm a woman but I don't paint china. The first time I got a canvas I felt free. Art is overreaction to life. I love these early drawings; they show my innocent beginnings in a small town. Life is a sentence -- you live it out. Maybe these portraits jump out at you too much. People like things that conform.

Alice Neel

The place where I had freedom most was when I painted. I was completely and utterly myself.

Alice Neel

When I was in my studio I didn't give a damn what sex I was... I thought art is art.

Alice Neel

Whether I'm painting or not, I have this overweening interest in humanity. Even if I'm not working, I'm still analyzing people.

Alice Neel

All experience is great providing you live through it. If it kills you, you've gone too far.

Alice Neel

Cezanne said, 'I love to paint people who have grown old naturally in the country.' And I say I love to paint people who have been torn to shreds by the rat race in New York.

Alice Neel

The minute I sat in front of a canvas I was happy. Because it was a world, and I could do what I liked in it.

Alice Neel

You should keep on painting no matter how difficult it is, because this is all part of experience, and the more experience you have, the better it is...unless it kills you, and then you know you have gone too far.

Alice Neel

Lucky for me, as old as I am, I can still change.

Alice Neel

Art is two things: a search for a road and a search for freedom.

Alice Neel

I thought you had to give up a lot for art, and you did. It required complete concentration. It also required that whatever money you had had to be put into art materials.

Alice Neel

Like Chekhov, I am a collector of souls... if I hadn't been an artist, I could have been a psychiatrist.

Alice Neel

If you're sufficiently tenacious and interested, you can accomplish what you want to accomplish in this world.

Alice Neel

Nobody knows what makes good art. As an artist, when it happens, you're grateful, and then you get on with it.

Alice Neel

I don't paint like a woman is supposed to paint. Thank God, art doesn't bother about things like that.

Alice Neel

You know it's very hard to maintain a theory in the face of life that comes crashing about you.

Alice Neel

I do not pose my sitters. I do not deliberate and then concoct... Before painting, when I talk to the person, they unconsciously assume their most characteristic pose, which in a way involves all their character and social standing - what the world has done to them and their retaliation.

Alice Neel

When women finally get liberated, they'll do the same that men do--dog eat dog-- that's what our culture is.... Not cooperation but assassination. Women will cooperate until they attain certain goals. Then one will begin to destroy the other.

Alice Neel

I know all the theory of everything but when I paint I don't think of anything except the subject and me.

Alice Neel

It's a privilege, you know, to paint and it takes up a lot of time and it means there's a lot of things you don't do. But still, with me, painting was more than a profession, it was also an obsession. I had to paint.

Alice Neel

When women finally get liberated, they'll do the same that men do - dog eat dog - that's what our culture is.

Alice Neel

Top 22 Quotes & Sayings by Alice Neel

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