Top 11 Quotes & Sayings by Matthew Collings

Artists don't often know much about writing... but they don't bray so much about writing as writers do about art.

I think with art you have to do a bit of transforming of the subject to make the art worth having.

Without rules you can't have anything, but you don't want to just be pedantic or obsessive. The painting is finished when it's working. The overall balance is right. Balance shouldn't be confused with design. There has to be restless jostle and aggression and a bit of dynamism, not just pat-ness or settled-ness or immediate pleasing-ness.

It was as if he (Sigmar Polke) painted his imagery in a highly wrought way, instead of a calculatedly dumb way, or mechanical way, by silk-screening or by tracing from epidiascope projections, and so on.

Colour can be the true main thing in art that is widely valued – even valued by the maker of the art – for other meanings.

The most painful thing for me is to be misunderstood.

Art has knowledge and skills, and to come to know them is to be implicitly against a culture that is against knowledge - today's mass culture, which aims to produce a lot of consuming morons.

Until the late 1970s there'd either be only black or white in the paintings or if there were colours it would be a small amount, not a large area, and with the color separated from other colors by black or white (which is formula for Damien Hirst's successful dot paintings, incidentally).

The art world is now a slave of mass culture. We have a sound-bite culture and so we have sound-bite art. You look at it, you get it - it's as immediate and as superficial as that.

What is painting today? It's a discontinued thing, discontinued from anything serious that happened in the past.

The whole idea of ideas in art is useless. Only have ideas about form.