A Quote by Frederick Sommer

Art is not arbitrary. A fine painting is not there by accident; it is not arrived at by chance. We are sensitive to tonalities. — © Frederick Sommer
Art is not arbitrary. A fine painting is not there by accident; it is not arrived at by chance. We are sensitive to tonalities.
I feel like what's most important for painting - which has been hierarchically on the top for a really long time in terms of what is considered fine art, by comparison with something like a comic book or what's considered low art - is that painting should open up laterally to include other cultures and things that don't immediately resonate as a painting but are obviously of equal contribution to the genre.
All painting is an accident. But it's also not an accident, because one must select what part of the accident one chooses to preserve.
Arguments against photography ever being considered a fine art are: the element of chance which enters in, — finding things ready-made for a machine to record, and of course the mechanics of the medium. I say that chance enters into all branches of art.
I was raised in an atmosphere of 'everything's fine.' But as I got older, I was like, 'Well no, everything's not fine. There is stuff that's sad.' I am a really sensitive person. I think I am too sensitive sometimes.
Initially I explored the tension between illustration and fine art when I first encountered miniature painting in my late teens. Championing the formal aspects of the Indo-Persian miniature-painting genre has often been at the core of my practice.
There is a better chance of getting an exciting painting from a laboured study with texture than from a fine drawing without it.
'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'm not anti conceptual art. I don't think painting must be revived, exactly. Art reflects life, and our lives are full of algorithms, so a lot of people are going to want to make art that's like an algorithm. But my language is painting, and painting is the opposite of that. There's something primal about it. It's innate, the need to make marks. That's why, when you're a child, you scribble.
Malevich, Lissitsky, Kandinsky, Tatlin, Pevsner, Rodchenko... all believed in the social role of art... Their works were like hinged doors, connecting activity with activity. Art with engineering; music with painting; poetry with design; fine art with propaganda; photographs with typography; diagrams with action; the studio with the street.
I think a good painting or a good work of art does many things it wants, I mean, maybe 15 or 20 or 100. One of the things a painting does is to make the room look better. It improves the wall that it's on. Which is much harder than it looks. And that's a good thing. And if one engages with a painting on that level, that's fine, that's great. After some time, familiarity, the other things that a painting does, the other layers, they just start to make themselves felt.
I don't mean to give performance art a bad name or anything; I think there are people that are legit. I think I just got frustrated painting - I love painting; I actually tried to be an artist, but it's sensitive, and then you have an object. And what do you do with that object? And then repeat and repeat, blah blah blah.
In fine arts, when you make a painting, it's just a painting. But if you make a painting in the entertainment industry, it can be an album cover or a t-shirt or a logo.
I loved surrealism and abstract painting, and anything related to those. I always thought painting was the highest form of art. What led me to drawing was seeing so much self-important, pretentious, conceptual-type art in university. I wanted to reject that by making quick, fun art.
Poetry is a very complex art.... It is an art of pure sound bound in through an art of arbitrary and conventional symbols.
A fine work of art - music, dance, painting, story - has the power to silence the chatter in the mind and lift us to another place.
Our experience of any painting is always the latest line in a long conversation we've been having with painting. There's no way of looking at art as though you hadn't seen art before.
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