A Quote by Antoni Tapies

Painting quickly is a calculated act to block out rational thought. — © Antoni Tapies
Painting quickly is a calculated act to block out rational thought.
Aristotle thought that humans are rational animals and Hobbes thought that we act on the basis of rational self-interest. If only! It's not that we never do these things, it's that they are hardly constituative of who and what we are.
When HSBC took the painting out of their building, they had to block the road and use a crane to bring the painting out from the window. They spent about 20,000 dollars just to get the painting out of the building! They said not to bring it back, and told Sotheby's to sell it immediately!
There is only one way to receive transmission. When I tell you something, do it immediately, without the least wavering thought. That's it. Learn. Open your heart and act. Thought stops action. It perverts it into calculated gesture stripped of grace and efficiency.
I thought as an actress I would be able to have broader emotional experiences, but then I quickly figured out that I wanted to think about tragic dramas, not act in them.
'Art or anti-art?' was the question I asked when I returned from Munich in 1912 and decided to abandon pure painting or painting for its own sake. I thought of introducing elements alien to painting as the only way out of a pictorial and chromatic dead end.
I wasn't interested in sport or anything obvious, so I didn't stand out. I was interested in music, but I couldn't read music, so I wasn't allowed to do the GCSE. I was interested in painting, but no one's interested in a 16-year-old boy who's interested in painting. I wanted to get out of school very, very quickly.
I thought I was going to be able to use my painting ideas as decoration on pottery, but my painting did not translate into decoration on pottery. I thought it was going to, and in fact I made, while still in school, a plate with one of my paintings on it, and that's exactly what it was, it was a plate with a painting on it. It was not a decorated plate; it was just a painting superimposed over a three-dimensional ceramic form.
I feel like I spend most of my time in a state of writer's block! When things do come out, they come out quickly.
I am a secularist in the Gandhian sense of the word, not the Nehruvian one. Nehru thought religion was an antique superstition which stood in the way of rational modern politics. I side with Gandhi, who wanted religious figures out of politics but also was suspicious of purely rational politics.
As much as you act like everything is programmed or calculated or researched or numbers, spins, radio, and clubs, it's still human beings out here you can reach with music.
I want to say, and this is very important: at the end we lucked out. It was luck that prevented nuclear war. We came that close to nuclear war at the end. Rational individuals: Kennedy was rational; Khrushchev was rational; Castro was rational. Rational individuals came that close to total destruction of their societies. And that danger exists today.
Realist painting has to do with leaving out a lot of detail. I think my painting can be a little shocking in all that it leaves out. But what happens is that the mind fills in what's missing . . . Painting is a way of making you see what I saw.
Scientists have calculated that the chances of something so patently absurd actually existing are millions to one. But magicians have calculated that million-to-one chances crop up nine times out of ten.
God forgive me for having thought it possible that a schoolmaster could be out and out a rational being.
In my profession you have to be very strong within yourself in order to block out the rejection and block out the opinions and the commentary that happens.
Painting is self-discovery. You arrive at the image through the act of painting.
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