A Quote by Wassily Kandinsky

An empty canvas is a living wonder... far lovelier than certain pictures.

Wassily Kandinsky

Quote Topics

Art Canvas Certain Empty Empty Canvas Far Living Pictures Than Wonder

Quote Author

Wassily Kandinsky
Russian - Artist
December 4, 1866 - December 13, 1944

An empty canvas is a living wonder - far lovelier than certain pictures.

Wassily Kandinsky

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.

Semir Zeki

I hope and dream the time will come when serious artists will make marvelous pictures that will love and live in life-like manner and be far more interesting and wonderful than pictures you now see on canvas. I think if Michelangelo was alive today he would immediately see the wonders...The artist can make his scenes and characters live instead of stand still on canvas in art museums.

Winsor McCay

To end up with a canvas that is no less beautiful than the empty canvas is to begin with.

Robert Motherwell

Living like an empty shell is not really living, no matter how many years it may go on. The heart and flesh of an empty shell give birth to nothing more than the life of an empty shell.

Haruki Murakami

Ah! How sweet coffee tastes! Lovelier than a thousand kisses, sweeter far than muscatel wine!

Johann Sebastian Bach

As far as the surface is concerned - oil on canvas, conventionally applied - my pictures have little to do with the original photograph. They are totally painting (whatever that may mean). On the other hand, they are so like the photograph that the thing that distinguished the photograph from all other pictures remains intact.

Gerhard Richter

A painter paints pictures on canvas. But musicians paint their pictures on silence.

Leopold Stokowski

At a certain moment the canvas began to appear to one American painter after another as an arena in which to act-rather than as a space in which to reproduce, re-design, analyze or express an object, actual or imagined. What was to go on the canvas was not a picture but an event.

Harold Rosenberg

I have named you queen. There are taller than you, taller. There are purer than you, purer. There are lovelier than you, lovelier. But you are the queen. When you go through the streets No one recognizes you. No one sees your crystal crown, no one looks At the carpet of red gold That you tread as you pass, The nonexistent carpet. And when you appear All the rivers sound In my body, bells Shake the sky, And a hymn fills the world. Only you and I, Only you and I, my love, Listen to it.

Pablo Neruda

The spectacle of the sky overwhelms me. Im overwhelmed when I see, in an immense sky, the crescent of the moon, or the sun. There, in my pictures, tiny forms in huge empty spaces. Empty spaces, empty horizons, empty plains - everything which is bare has always greatly impressed me.

Joan Miro

Pictures! Pictures! Pictures! Often, before I learned, did I wonder whence came the multitudes of pictures that thronged my dreams; for they were pictures the like of which I had never seen in real wake-a-day life. They tormented my childhood, making of my dreams a procession of nightmares and a little later convincing me that I was different from my kind, a creature unnatural and accursed.

Jack London

Little wonder that we. . .find the old pictures of openness - pictures usually without any blur, and made by what seems a ritual of patience - wonderful. They restore to us knowledge of a place we seek but lose in the rush of our search. Though to enjoy even the pictures, much less the space itself, requires that we be still longer than is our custom.

Robert Adams

Empty canvas. In appearance - really empty, silent, indifferent. Stunned, almost. In effect - full of tensions, with thousand subdued voices, heavy with expectations. A little frightened because it may be violated

Wassily Kandinsky

An empty canvas, apparently really empty, that says nothing and is without significance – almost dull, in fact – in reality, is crammed with thousands of undertone tensions and full of expectancy. Slightly apprehensive lest it should be outraged.

Wassily Kandinsky

Yes, I sold buttons to earn living. But I took pictures to keep on living. Pictures are my life – as necessary as eating or breathing.