Top 33 Quotes & Sayings by Richard Diebenkorn
Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American artist Richard Diebenkorn.
Last updated on December 21, 2024.
In abstract painting, I worried about the limited range of possibilities that, as time went on, became increasingly important to me. I wanted to express or deal with differences that an all-over paint and canvas 'presence' neutralized.
My father didn't think being an artist was a respectable or worthy goal for a man.
With rare exceptions, I respond most to painting that cuts across grain rather than following it. I think the artist here can get in touch with that grain rather than simply feel its flow. And he really can't cut right across it anyway.
I want a painting to be difficult to do. The more obstacles, obstructions, problems - if they don't overwhelm - the better. I would like to feel that I am involved at any stage of the painting with all its moments, not just this 'now' moment where a superficial grace is so available.
My insights come in periods of working. There are wonderful moments of surprise, but I'm superstitious enough not to want to talk about them.
Maybe the given person, cup, or landscape is lost before one gets to painting. A figure exerts a continuing and unspecified influence on a painting as the canvas develops. The represented forms are loaded with psychological feeling. It can't ever just be painting.
If you get an image try to destroy it.
Abstract means literally to draw from or separate. In this sense every artist is abstract for he must create his own work from his visual impressions. A realistic or non-objective approach makes no difference. The result is what counts.
Don't be a Pollyanna!
My freedom consists in my moving about within the narrow frame that I have assigned myself for each one of my undertakings.
Don't 'discover' a subject of any kind.
I trust the symbol that is arrived at in the making of the painting. Meaningful symbols aren't invented as such, they are made or discovered as symbol later.
I can never accomplish what I want - only what I would have wanted had I thought of it beforehand.
I came to mistrust my desire to explode the picture and supercharge it in some way… what is more important is a feeling of strength in reserve – tension beneath calm.
Somehow don't be bored, but if you must, use it in action. Use its destructive potential.
My freedom will be so much the greater and more meaningful, the more narrowly I limit my field of action and the more I surround myself with obstacles.
In a successful painting everything is integral - all the parts belong to the whole. If you remove an aspect or element you are removing its wholeness.
My father didn't think being an artist was a respectable or worthy goal for a man. He hoped I would see my way to more serious work and would find myself turning towards medicine, law, or business.
All paintings start out of a mood, out of a relationship with things or people, out of a complete visual impression
I have found in my still-life work that I seem to be able to tell what objects are important to me by what tends to stay in the painting as it develops.
I would like the colors, their shapes and positions to be arrived at in response to and dictated by the condition of the total space at the time they are considered.
Do search, but in order to find other than what is searched for.
I keep plastering it until it comes around to what I want, in terms of all I know and think about painting now, as well as in terms of the initial observation.
All paintings start out of a mood, out of a relationship with things or people, out of a complete visual impression. To call this expression abstract seems to me often to confuse the issue. Abstract means literally to draw from or separate. In this sense every artist is abstract . . . a realistic or non-objective approach makes no difference. The result is what counts.
Mistakes can't be erased, but they move you from your present position.
When I am halfway there with a painting, it can occasionally be thrilling... But it happens very rarely; usually it's agony... I go to great pains to mask the agony. But the struggle is there. It's the invisible enemy.
I don't go into the studio with the idea of 'saying' something. What I do is face the blank canvas and put a few arbitrary marks on it that start me on some sort of dialogue.
Use and respond to the initial fresh qualities but consider them absolutely expendable.
One wants to see the artifice of the thing as well as the subject.
I want painting to be difficult to do.
As a work progresses, its power to elicit and dictate response mounts. There seems to be an optimum moment when this power is at its greatest which just precedes the point where 'elicit' is no longer apt usage. 'Dictates' is the word for this condition and tyranny is the adversary.
Attempt what is not certain. Certainty may or may not come later. It may then be a valuable delusion.
And I can just see that sometimes the technique is blasting powder rather than steady struggle.
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