Paintings Quotes

“Great paintings—people flock to see them, they draw crowds, they’re reproduced endlessly on coffee mugs and mouse pads and anything-you-like. And, I count myself in the following, you can have a lifetime of perfectly sincere museum-going where you traipse around enjoying everything and then go out and have some lunch. But if a painting really works down in your heart and changes the way you see, and think, and feel, you don’t think, ‘oh, I love this picture because it’s universal.’ ‘I love this painting because it speaks to all mankind.’ That’s not the reason anyone loves a piece of art. It’s a secret whisper from an alleyway. Psst, you. Hey kid. Yes you. An individual heart-shock. Your dream, Welty’s dream, Vermeer’s dream. You see one painting, I see another, the art book puts it at another remove still, the lady buying the greeting card at the museum gift shop sees something else entire, and that’s not even to mention the people separated from us by time—four hundred years before us, four hundred years after we’re gone—it’ll never strike anybody the same way and the great majority of people it’ll never strike in any deep way at all but—a really great painting is fluid enough to work its way into the mind and heart through all kinds of different angles, in ways that are unique and very particular. Yours, yours. I was painted for you. And—oh, I don’t know, stop me if I’m rambling… but Welty himself used to talk about fateful objects. Every dealer and antiquaire recognizes them. The pieces that occur and recur. Maybe for someone else, not a dealer, it wouldn’t be an object. It’d be a city, a color, a time of day. The nail where your fate is liable to catch and snag.”

“Great paintings—people flock to see them, they draw crowds, they’re reproduced endlessly on coffee mugs and mouse pads and anything-you-like. And, I count myself in the following, you can have a lifetime of perfectly sincere museum-going where you traipse around enjoying everything and then go out and have some lunch. But if a painting really works down in your heart and changes the way you see, and think, and feel, you don’t think, ‘oh, I love this picture because it’s universal.’ ‘I love this painting because it speaks to all mankind.’ That’s not the reason anyone loves a piece of art. It’s a secret whisper from an alleyway. Psst, you. Hey kid. Yes you. An individual heart-shock. Your dream, Welty’s dream, Vermeer’s dream. You see one painting, I see another, the art book puts it at another remove still, the lady buying the greeting card at the museum gift shop sees something else entire, and that’s not even to mention the people separated from us by time—four hundred years before us, four hundred years after we’re gone—it’ll never strike anybody the same way and the great majority of people it’ll never strike in any deep way at all but—a really great painting is fluid enough to work its way into the mind and heart through all kinds of different angles, in ways that are unique and very particular. Yours, yours. I was painted for you. And—oh, I don’t know, stop me if I’m rambling… but Welty himself used to talk about fateful objects. Every dealer and antiquaire recognizes them. The pieces that occur and recur. Maybe for someone else, not a dealer, it wouldn’t be an object. It’d be a city, a color, a time of day. The nail where your fate is liable to catch and snag.”

“The paintings of Francis Bacon to my eye are very beautiful. The paintings of Bosch or Goya are to my eye very beautiful. I've also stood in front of those same paintings with people who've said, 'let's get on to the Botticellis as soon as possible.' I have lingered, of course.”

“For Merleau-Ponty, the phenomenology of the human body, the very phenomenon of the human body, is intimately linked to "the problems of painting": "Things have an internal equivalent in me; they arouse in me a carnal formula of their presence. Why shouldn't these [correspondences] in turn give rise to some [external] visible shape in which anyone else would recognize those motifs which support his own inspection of the world?" Painting brings forth a carnal visuality, an embodied and incarnate image, by establishing the internal equivalent ("in me") of the outside world, which is made of the "same stuff." I am an extension of the world, but the world extends, intensifies, forms a "line of intensity," to use Gilles Deleuze's idiom, inside me. The world forms a "strange system of exchanges" with me; I am constituted in an exchange with the world. Painting makes this continuity visible, is itself the visualization of this continuity, of this blending of the inside and out. Images—"designs" and "paintings"—says Merleau-Ponty, are "the inside of the outside and the outside of the inside, which the duplicity of feeling makes possible and without which we would never understand the quasi presence and imminent visibility which make up the whole problem of the imaginary.”

“I think of my peace paintings as one long poem, with each painting being a single stanza.”

“When I started my own practice, I was criticized, not because I was doing product design but because, like Le Corbusier, I was insisting on paintings in all of my buildings. I would paint wall murals in the houses that I designed, just as he did in the '20s and '30s.”

“The Australian Aboriginal cave paintings, from this period, are the first hints of religion that humans have as proof of religious behaviour. The caves in which the paintings are found date to 50,000 years ago through forensic geology and carbon dating. Most of the images found in their religious stories and ceremonies are depicted in these caves. We also have confirmation from the aborigines themselves that these images are their religious images. These paintings also are likely to be significant evidence for linking the use of Amanita Muscaria to its use 50,000 years ago. This is because 50,000 years ago was when humanity entered Australia and also because Amanita Muscaria produces religious like experiences.”

“I love Christmas tree bulbs, and I started putting them in my paintings. You've got to plug this painting in, and it's got a rig in the back, so that each one can be replaced if it burns out.”

“The old, sad art colors are gone. Now I paint bright colors. I paint paintings which are happy, where children are laughing and playing with animals. I paint paradise on Earth. I still paint sadness sometimes, but there is sadness in the world, too.”

“To talk about paintings is not only difficult but perhaps pointless too. You can only express in words what words are capable of expressing-- what language can communicate. Painting has nothing to do with that.”

“Your paintings are staggeringly beautiful. Did I ever tell you that,or was I just too concerned that you weren't going to earn a living? I know the answer...I worried that the paint was so thickly applied that it might snap off and ruin someone's carpet, rather than realizing that you'd made color itself tactile.”