Top 28 Quotes & Sayings by Milton Resnick

When you don't know how to pick up a brush, you don't know anything; at that moment you're an artist. I'll simply say, 'If you know less, you're better off as an artist.

As soon as you see what you're looking at you have a name for it. You don't see it. The whole process of your thinking is not to see. You overcome sight by thinking.

It's absolutely irrelevant what galleries and critics and people who buy your paintings think. They just don't have any possible idea of what happens to you and they're really not that interested. As a matter of fact, they hate the idea that anything really happens to you. They want you to be a genius and that's it.

About three years went by and I had become exhausted - really at the end of my rope almost - and I thought I couldn't last much longer... and at the very end, when I thought of giving it all up, suddenly I thought it was good. I knew that I now understood something about it and I painted it as easily as you can imagine.

I am not a follower of Monet. I am not an admirer or follower of De Kooning. I am not an action painter. I am not an abstract expressionist. I am not younger or older. I will not take my hat off to any other artist living or dead in all the world. I know this.

You always have the memory of the bottom, and fear of the bottom. And when you start going to the bottom you panic.

No one escapes that moment of innocence when the world attacks him and installs within him the spirit of opposites... As long as everything within you is saying yes and no, dark and light, with big earth-shaking ideas, you come nowhere near art, I think. Light and dark don't exist for us as artists. Light is something given to you and you're allowing it to pass through.

You have to give in to what the paint says... You have to do what it's telling you to do.

Pulling yourself up again is the most important part of your life. Getting out of the bottom that you put everything into - yourself!

I painted myself out of my painting.

Nothing in the world excites the culture today so much as a question. A question seems very appropriate to whatever you have in mind. Allowing your work to remain questionable is a way of satisfying your cultural condition.

You have to become complete in some way; a universe - a complete thing in yourself - in order to reach across and breathe some unity onto this thing you're faced with. If you intentionally avoid that unity that is within yourself then you will avoid unity in your work.

As long as you can change paint, you don't change. For you to change - for paint to do something to you - paint must stay constant.

There are people who can't stand the pain. What happens is they begin to develop some kind of technique to keep out of that hole. Once they do that, they're finished. They never go any further. They're done.

I'd fallen asleep thinking I was much too tired to go on working and if I went on working, I'd lose it. I'd get a better hold of it in the morning; feel stronger. But I looked and looked at it and it seemed to me there was nothing to do.

What you have to do is disavow yourself from any sense other than ascendancy. That's the only direction you could possibly have towards painting. There's no other direction at all. There's no other space in art. There's no other way in which you can find yourself except in somehow feeling it. And by holding to this feeling you can once again reach out and guess and miss - and sometimes hit.

So now, how did God produce this world?... The fable is that he breathed upon us. In his breath, his wind, came moisture and things began to grow... a message of hope. Nothing physical. How do you intend for your breath to become a work of art? The only way I can see it is that you prevent your breath from becoming a structure. As soon as your breath takes on the form of a room, you are a carpenter; you're not God.

There's something peculiar about artists. They have ups and downs... After a while everything you do is just wonderful... then you slide back. If you're a good artist you're going to go down. And then it's up to you.

As soon as you set yourself up in the position of transferring paint from one place to another, your whole culture invades you. It tells you all about the history of art.

From the very beginning, art meant something very important to the people who made it. It was a correspondence of the emotions to what you saw; it wasn't knowledge. You were being at one with something eternal; something outside of yourself. And no matter how many fake things have been brought in to suit other conditions... That is still true.

There is some other form that you contain within yourself that is not will or purpose and, when applied to art, serves you best. If you systematically apply to the art that you create the aggression of the world that turned you towards art in the first place; if you, in turn, become the aggressor towards your canvas, the thing that you're doing; if you, in turn, work your will upon this thing that you want - you will then cause a dissatisfaction in this life that you create.

The act, the doing, the taking up of paint and putting it down - the immediate impact upon your psyche or soul that occurs when you do that - has so much danger in it.

The religions never wanted an art where you paint only what you see.

It was told in the Bible. A man fell. He bit into knowledge and fell... How do you fall without falling completely? What do you bring as knowledge to a blank canvas? How do you begin?

If there's no unity in your work, then you've deliberately made yourself into that kind of person. You don't want that unity in your work. You've made some kind of satisfactory arrangement with your culture.

Each of us has a universal within us. There's always that making of parts - but it doesn't touch the universal within you.

Painting is... a correspondence between what you are and what you see. It's a moment when something is holding together in such a way that it is a universe in itself... Within this is a test and also a judgment upon yourself, your capabilities, your promises, and the part that you play in the world. And nobody else can test that for you. Certainly not the Museum of Modern Art.

Your culture demands that you bring some kind of crisis to your work and therefore you can not bring any unity to it. In order to bring crisis into your work you have to bring it to a state of expectancy. In other words you have to leave your work in the state of mind of being a question.