A Quote by Kazimir Malevich

A painted surface is a real, living form. — © Kazimir Malevich
A painted surface is a real, living form.
A face painted in a picture gives a pitiful parody of life. . . but a painted surface lives.
What is real is not the external form, but the essence of things... it is impossible for anyone to express anything essentially real by imitating its exterior surface.
You can't get at the thing itself, the real nature of the sitter, by stripping away the surface. You can only get beyond the surface by working with the surface. All that you can do is manipulate that surface - gesture, costume, expression - radically and correctly.
All my forebears worked for a living. My grandfather painted portraits. My mother too. My aunt painted seascapes.
A painting is an object which has an emphatic frontal surface. On such a surface, I paint a black band which does not recede, a color band which does not obtrude, a white square or rectangle which does not move back or forth, to or fro, or up or down; there is also a painted white exterior frame band which is edged round the edge to the black. Every part is painted and contiguous to its neighbor; no part is above or below any other part. There is no hierarchy. There is no ambiguity. There is no illusion. There is no space or interval (time).
The grey paintings, for example, a painted grey surface, completely monochromatic - they come from a motivation, or result from a state, that was very negative. It has a lot to do with hopelessness, depression and such things. But it has to be turned on its head in the end, and has to come to a form where these paintings possess beauty. And in this case, it's not a carefree beauty, but rather a serious one.
Every real form is a world. And any plastic surface is more alive than a face from which stares a pair of eyes and a smile.
I want my paintings to give the viewer a true sense of reality - that includes but is not limited to depth, scale and a tactile surface as well as the real sense of what the subject looks like and is feeling at the time that I painted them. There should be a discourse between the viewer and the subject, to feel as though they are in a way connected. My goal is not to set a narrative but rather to have the viewer bring their own experiences to the painting and the subject as they would if they had seen the subject on the street in real life.
For the surface, I'm not interested in painterly convention. It's more interesting if it looks like it painted itself.
When the conception of internal form is governed by edge, color appears to remain on or above the surface. I think, on the contrary, of color as being seen in and throughout, not solely on, the surface.
As what you first are moves in the context of form, you have real reflection within that form, real reflection of what you are, what you are being and what you are doing. The movement in form enables you to comprehend what you are.
If I were writing about Picasso and pointed out that he painted women because he was interested in the female form, that would seem like an obvious point. I don't know why people revolt when I point out that Rockwell painted the male figure and was interested in it.
I just love real characters; they're not pretentious, and every emotion is on the surface, they're regular working people. Their likes, their dislikes, their loves, their hates, their passions; they're all right there on the surface.
I don’t abstract from anything.…I am involved with real space, the room itself, real light, and real surface.
When a buddha is painted, not only a clay altar or lump of earth is used, but the thirty-two marks, a blade of grass, and the cultivation of wisdom for incalculable eons are used. As a Buddha has been painted on a single scroll in this way, all buddhas are painted buddhas, and all painted buddhas are actual buddhas.
The great black and white draftsman, the sculptor, and the blind man know that form and color are separate. The form itself is what the blind man knows...Color is surface skin that fits over the form.
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