Top 75 Quotes & Sayings by Michael Craig-Martin

My great grandmother was Chinese .

In the late 70's I started to make drawings of the ordinary objects I had been using in my work. Initially I wanted them to be ready-made drawings of the kind of common objects I had always used in my work. I was surprised to discover I couldn't find the simple, neutral drawings I had assumed existed, so I started to make them myself.

If you close the door to the things you feel comfortable with, you will never discover the truth about yourself.

I have never understood, for instance, why some people see contemporary art as divided between 'painting' and 'conceptual art', as though this represented a genuine division.

The complexity of the language of images is disguised by the ease and rapidity with which we read them. I've tried to make work that is as transparent and simple as possible. No matter how much I strip away the result is always more complex to me than I expect.

I am trying to present objects in the simplest way possible, and I don't want to supply too much context.

It is very important to develop the thing that you are naturally good at, that you are truly interested in.

I think the best approach is not to be too much like the thing that they are referring to, see it as a guide.

You can take things from the past, from the culture, from the immediate past and things that have not yet entered the culture, so they have no history yet. You can create your own context.

When I was invited to go to Wuhan, I didn't know anything about it, so I looked up the Wikipedia about Wuhan. I discovered that part of Wuhan used to be Hankou, and then I realised that my great grandmother came from Hankou. My grandmother and father were both born in Hankou. Of all the places in China, it is the most amazing place to have asked for my exhibition. I needed to go back where my family comes from!

When I was a very young student I loved and admired the work of Sam Beckett, who is famously pessimistic, and whose writing is an extraordinary examination of emptiness. I wanted to be like Beckett. I don't have the same attitude toward the world, I'm naturally optimistic, and so of course I could never be like Beckett. You can't force yourself to become like someone you admire.

If things are too similar, the dialogue is not very interesting. If you put in contrast, big and small, abstract and representational, you set up the possibility of a discourse.

When I look at the objects that I draw, it seems to me so obvious about the contemporary world - these are our world.

There is a complete difference between art and the art market. Prices are high now for the simple reason that there are people are willing to pay them. The market dominates the art world today because at the moment collectors call the shots. Like everything else that won't last forever.

Often people do not properly value things that they are good at naturally because they find them too easy. That is very problematic.

If you try to copy something exactly you won't get it correct, because you don't share the same tradition and context.

I think that cultural influence is very deep, it is not on the surface and this is true in every culture.

For many years I hoped to have an exhibition in China, because of my family connection.

I wanted to make new works of very contemporary objects, which I thought was interesting because many of them are manufactured in China, but these objects are universal, they go across all languages, all cultures.

You can't force yourself to be something you are not.

I am personally happy for artists to make as much money as they can while they can to carry them through the times when they can't.

You can't honour someone by copying them or trying to be exactly like them.

When I was teaching I often said to students that you are trying to be too creative, don't be too creative, because there is so much already in what you are making, you don't need to do very much. You just need to do a little bit, and that is a lot.

I thought the objects we value least because they were ubiquitous were actually the most extraordinary.

I decided I should use the most obvious colours - the basic colours with simple names: red, purple, yellow, pink. I don't distort the objects, I don't change the objects, I draw them exactly as they are. I do the opposite with the colours.

You can see in my paintings, I've taken away the context, I've taken away the shadows, I've taken away expression, I've taken away the personal, and yet so much remains!

My idea for every exhibition is we should be able to see every individual work without being distracted by the others, and it doesn't matter if it's quite crowded.

I think from an artist's point of view, everything in art, in fact everything in the world is available as material.

The viewer brings all additional information to the image.

For example, in England, we teach about Expressionism, but it is not the same in England as it is in Germany, because Expressionism is more important in the history of German art. So although it is the same history, the emphasis is different.

I have been using the computer as a work aid since the mid-90's. It is extraordinarily well suited to how I think and work and has transformed my practice. Nearly everything I have done in the past 15 years would have been impossible without it. I use the computer for drawing, composing and colour planning everything, from postage stamps to paintings to architectural-scale installations.

The identifying personal association with objects, which are not personal, is an important modern experience - our real association, the strands of our feelings about the objects that surround us. It's also because they are so familiar, we don't think of them as important in the world, but actually they are the world. We are living in a very material world.

I think that the exchange is very important. Before I did the exhibition in Shanghai, I was a judge for the John Moores Painting Prize and that was very interesting for me, because some of the judges are Chinese and some are British, and we look at the work together. It was fascinating that most of the time we were in complete agreement, but some of the time we were not. People send their works from all over China. For a foreigner, this gave me a very good picture about what is happening in China and its art today.

All the basic information should be in the object itself.

I came to painting through sculpture, to images through objects. I think that images sit in the middle, somewhere between objects and words.

It's important for me to give each thing the possibility to speak and also to allow artworks speak to each other.

The person you admire was true to himself. You can only truly honour him by being true to yourself.

I would never put a sculpture in front of a painting, so that it is difficult to see the painting. I always place each thing so you can see it isolated. You can focus on every individual work.

It's just that some things more important for this and less important for that, and this is true regardless the style of the art.

I look at the character of the exhibition and I treat it as I would a painting or an installation. When I did the Summer Exhibition at Royal Academy, I did it exactly as I would when making a new work.

I was poorer than anyone I'd ever met. But it was a great time to be a young artist - I remember it as a period of exceptional creative freedom and adventure, when one was regularly presented with works of art unlike anything one had ever seen before.

[I] don't want people to see it [paintings] as a specific intention on my part. If somebody has that interest in these objects, of course they can see that, but from my own point of view, I'd rather stay as neutral as possible.

The internet has extended the possibility of making art to more people, and particularly of enabling it to be seen by others. I am sure the internet is having a profound impact on art, particularly those who have grown up with it, but making good art will remain as difficult (and as easy) as it ever was. Having a lasting impact may become more not less difficult.

I try to make images that have the immediate presence we take for granted in objects - a chair, a shoe, a book, a Judd - and compose them like sentences.

Art is more to do with observation than invention.

The art world, of all worlds, has room for everyone.

I greatly admired him as a teacher I didn't teach the same way as Josef Albers at all.

I don't like the idea of nationalism, but on the other hand, I do see that there is a difference between British art, German art and Chinese art. This is because of the history, because each country has different history and each country reads and teaches that history differently.

When I go to China I see many artists whose work reflects on aspects of contemporary popular culture but obviously the history of Western art is not part of their own tradition.

Whatever happens to the art world, art will go on regardless. As for obscurity, it looms just over the horizon beckoning us all. Why worry.

In the period of '60s to the '90s, British art schools were small, and the number of student was small. The personal contact was great.

Usually when I go to the Summer Exhibition, I think every room is too much the same, and I loose my capacity to look at individual works.

I do think I paid a price as an artist, and I am trying to make up for it now - I work six days a week in the studio, and I've never been happier.

Today, in British education, we don't have that kind of freedom. Now there are many regulations, many rules, and bureaucracies in the education system. So, it doesn't have the flexibility that it had in the '60s, '70s, '80s.

Usually people start with painting and then go on to make installations; my painting came from installation.

'Understanding' art is like having a sense of humour - if you don't have one, no amount of explanation is going to make you laugh.

As an artist you are free to use any image, any style, any idea from any culture and any period of history.

In Britain the power of authority was weakened. There was much more individual freedom and there was great academic freedom.

If I did not love the things that I do, how could I spend my life doing this? You have to invest what you spend your life doing with pleasure.

The first exhibition that I used bright colours in painting the room was at a gallery in Paris, and there were seven rooms in the gallery. It was very nice gallery, not very big rooms, around the courtyard, it was a very French space. So I painted each room in different colour. When people came to the exhibition, I saw they came with a smile. Everybody smiles - this is something I never saw in my work before.