Top 11 Quotes & Sayings by Harold Town

Explore popular quotes and sayings by Harold Town.

Last updated on April 18, 2025.

Harold Barling Town, was a Canadian abstract painter. He is best known as a member of Painters Eleven a group of abstract artists active in Toronto from 1954-1960. Town coined the name of the group, which was based simply on the number of artists that were present the first meeting. He also worked as an illustrator, a profession he credited with imparting a sense of discipline that would last throughout his entire artistic career. His early illustrative appeared in magazines such as Maclean's and Mayfair.

June 13, 1924 - December 27, 1990

Source: Wikipedia

Painting is still to a great extent dominated by a central image; corners in most cases are like uninvited guests at a party, uneasy and unattended.

Harold Town

It took me over a couple of months to find the right piece of transparent paper for a section near the centre, on the right side of the Garden of Nebuchadnezzar. When I did find it, it was on a bottle of my wife's toilet water.

Harold Town

Any artist who doesn't think he's the best should quit.

Harold Town

It's such an honour being banned in Italy, the mother of sensuality. It's like being asked to straighten your tie in a bordello... It's ironic that the pictures were removed on the complaint of a cardinal. I regard censorship as a cardinal sin.

Harold Town

I don't believe anyone really likes paint, unless he's tempted to eat it.

Harold Town

I make up a set of rules and play within those rules until I win.

Harold Town

Made up of corallitic accretions and painful increments, lit on rare occasions by bolts of revelation, and then stuffed behind the wainscotting to grope in the mouse-turd dust, art is the equivalent of athlete's foot, at best an exquisite itch, at worst an excuse to stop walking. On the emotional side, it is either masturbation with a hockey glove or a night beneath the sliding moon that shames Eros.

Harold Town

With love I draw what I hate.

Harold Town

If art could be absolutely verified as to importance in, say, the way gold can be judged for purity and weight, then it would of course be finished as mythic activity. Free of doubt, controversy, and the inexplicable fluctuation of reputation, art-making would bear the same relationship to creativity as cake mix does to baking.

Harold Town

Thomson's small oil sketches of the last years palpitate and throb. They are as direct in attack as a punch in the nose.

Harold Town

I am interested in doing something that cannot be explained.

Harold Town