A Quote by Joni Mitchell

I wanted to paint in a folk-artist-y way. My heroes were Van Gogh, Gauguin, Matisse, and Rembrandt. I think Picasso is about as a modern as I got. But I incorporated things that they rejected as well as movements that happened later.

Joni Mitchell

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About Artist Folk Got Happened Heroes Later Matisse Modern Movements Paint Picasso Rejected Rembrandt Things Think Van Van Gogh Wanted Way Well Were

Quote Author

Joni Mitchell
Canadian - Musician
Born: November 7, 1943

Picasso and Matisse were the guys I wanted to get away from, and cubism is all still lifes. Their paintings are all closed drawings. And still life is a perfect form for that. By the mid-'50s, I sort of dropped the still life. The large picture was a way of getting around them, too. The abstract expressionists were also into the large form because it was a way of getting around Matisse and Picasso. Picasso can't paint big paintings. Matisse didn't bother after a certain point.

Alex Katz

I thought it would be very nice to become Picasso or Rembrandt, or a van Gogh.

Dick Bruna

A lot of the most prolific painters died broke and weren't appreciated in their time. I'm trying to remember who exactly I was thinking of - like Rembrandt, van Gogh or Gauguin. Some of those guys, they got whole floors of museums to themselves but weren't really appreciated in their time at all.

Vic Mensa

To me, James Harden is like basketball's Picasso - he's an artist whose work you respect, even if you don't always understand its significance until later. (Or maybe Van Gogh or some other artist - I'm not an art history buff, but you get my point).

Trevor Ariza

People can see you on TV sloshing paint around with big four-inch brushes, and I learned to talk to camera in a friendly voice, not talking down to people, just explaining what I was doing. People like Picasso, Van Gogh, and Rembrandt did not have a weekly TV programme where people could see them painting.

Rolf Harris

If I could have any artist's work on my sitting room wall it would probably be by Van Gogh or Picasso.

Juliet Stevenson

As an artist you have to find something that deeply interests you. It's not enough to make art that is about art, to look at Matisse and Picasso and say, how can I paint like them? You have to be obsessed by something that can't come out in any other way, then the other things - the skill and technique - will follow.

Anselm Kiefer

I had a Vincent van Gogh, a small Provençal landscape. We sold it. If you're going to have a van Gogh it should be a really good van Gogh.

Pierre Berge

Although most of us know Vincent van Gogh in Arles and Paul Gauguin in Tahiti as if they were neighbors -- somewhat disreputable but endlessly fascinating -- none of us can name two French generals or department store owners of that period. I take enormous pride in considering myself an artist, one of the necessaries.

James A. Michener

There's the artist's intimacy and truthfulness to himself, but an equal intimacy to the Other [the one drawn]. Picasso drawings are like that... the Rembrandts are like that. The artist who most often did that was Van Gogh.

John Berger

And then I went round the corner and there's a Van Gogh portrait, and you just think, well, this is another level. A higher level, actually. I love the Sargent, but it's not the level of Van Gogh.

David Hockney

I said, I don't want to paint things like Picasso's women and Matisse's odalisques lying on couches with pillows. I don't want to paint people. I want to paint something I have never seen before. I don't want to make what I'm looking at. I want the fragments.

Ellsworth Kelly

I've never really understood the term 'Post-Impressionism' as more than a label for Cezanne, Gauguin and van Gogh.

Nigel Hamilton

Vincent van Gogh's mother painted all of his best things. The famous mailed decapitated ear was a figment of the public relations firm engaged by Van Gogh's dealer.

Roy Blount, Jr.

No one would want to pay a penny for an empty canvas by me. But it would be quite another if the empty canvas were signed by a great artist. I would be surprised if an empty canvas by Picasso or Matisse signed and inscribed with the words, 'I wanted to paint such and such on this canvas, but did not do so,' would not fetch thousands... After all, with an empty canvas, the possibilities are limitless, and so perhaps is the cash.