Good art has everything you need to know about it in the work, not on a wall label. Art is here to take us beyond language.
Art may be for the privileged few but they have earned the privilege and deny it to no one.
Art is not 'about.' Art is.
Postmodernism lives in the academy, where words abandon reality to serve ambition, and reputations rise on hot air.
Art rides in on pleasure.
When you are painting a landscape, assume the painting is real and the landscape is an illusion.
Always let intuitive perception precede analysis.
The first duty of intelligence is to recognize the obvious.
Very few people ever understand art. If you are lucky, they will buy it for the wrong reasons.
Purplish brown? Let's agree it / is a color so bad we all flee it / it has no good use / so let's name it Puce / from the sound we make when we see it.
Don't explain, enjoy.
When anything can be art, art is not much of anything.
A critic without a good eye is a eunuch in a harem.
Nothing is as hopeless as trying to justify art in words.
Good art, no matter how simple or casual-seeming, always carries a high density of choice.
In ART as in Life the Best Way to REMEDY mistakes is to take advantage of them.
Too much freedom inhibits choice. Constructive narrowness clarifies choice.
Assumptions are usually presumptuous but often correct.
When imitation goes over big, it isn't imitation, it is a trend.
Talent is like a seed which needs fertile soil. There is no less talent now, there is less fertile soil to nourish it.
To an art historian a Giotto is a 14th Century painting. To an artist it was painted yesterday. We free ourselves from the past when we see it freshly.
We must turn away from work that replaces experience and pleasure with explanation.
Power is like money. Some know how to get it; few know how to use it.
Postmodernism is Modernism with Alzheimer's.
When anything goes, everything goes.
Postmodernism is silly and joyless at the same time.
There is no best way to make art, but there are a lot of better ways.
Art is there for nourishment, not explication.
Craft' gets a bad rap. Mediocre art is not caused by craft; it is caused by artists. Good art employs whatever craft works best.
Limitation of means is a precondition of excellence. Creative freedom chooses its limitations. Destructive freedom rejects them heedlessly.
Art makes you reinvent the wheel with regularity. If you don't, art gets bored and slips away.
If art depended on content, then one painting of an apple would be as good as the next one.
Of course I will look at anything, but I have not got the time or the patience to keep on looking at art that I know could be better. I don't want art that needs fixing, I want art that sends me back to the studio to fix my own.
Whether something is called art is beside the point. What counts is what happens when you ask it to actually be art.
Big minds have big ideas. Small minds use big ideas to justify bad ideas.
The more freedom artists have to do what they want to do, the more they do what other artists are doing.
Without the eye, the head is blind. Without the head, the eye is adrift.
When you have made a good painting, don't do another like it, but remember the process, what you did, what you were thinking and feeling.
No high-minded painter of the last fifty years has been able to come to terms with his art without coming to terms with the problem of cubism.
Convention and restriction release inhibition and provoke the imagination.
Part of history is facts. The other part is what we find easier to believe.
Asking art to express ideas is like asking a Sumo wrestler to play charades.
Great art does not break with the past. It breaks with the present by emulating the best of the past.
Science is a matter of adjusting language to explain material reality. Art is a matter of adjusting material reality to create a sense of life.
When inspiration dies, imitation thrives.
Live to paint, don't paint to live.
A clear idea about the nature of quality in art will always result in inferior art tailored to it.
Most art is just surface noise.
The art consensus is not criteria, it is convenience.
Complete freedom debilitates art but reveals much about character.
When anyone can produce dreck or publish gibberish, and not only get away with it but be celebrated for it, the discipline is no longer a discipline, and it will get no respect.
One needs to be right before getting righteous.
Don't burden art with words and ideas. Art comes from a deeper place.
Art is too popular. If plumbing was as popular as art is we would have amateur plumbers running around brandishing wrenches and Roto-Rooters, climbing in and out of sewers and writing gibberish about pipe systems. And none of our our toilets would work.
Experience is real. Painting, which comes out of experience, is real. The world is an illusion.
Writing about art is only useful when it leads to the experience of art.
If you learn something too well, it will get in the way of your perception of reality.
When good ideas get put to bad use, it is the fault of the user, not the idea.
Originality is way overrated. To make, you need to take. All great artists do.
If we see an object as a bowl, it may inhibit seeing it as craft, just as seeing it as craft might inhibit seeing it as art. See first; name later.