The conscience of an artist worthy of the name is like an incurable disease which causes him endless torment but occasionally fills him with silent joy.
Every museum is full of nice things. That's the opposite of before. It was important things or serious things. Now we have interesting things.
I'm still very sure that painting is one of the most basic human capacities, like dancing and singing, that make sense, that stay with us, as something human.
When I begin, theoretically and practically I can smear anything I want on the canvas. Then there's a condition I have to react to, by changing it or destroying it.
I don't think I can do this - painting under observation. It's the worst thing there is, worse than being in the hospital.
I believe that art has a kind of rightness, as in music, when we hear whether or not a note is false
I think that an artist is a bit like a computer. He receives information from the world around him and from his past and from his own experiences. And it all goes into the brain.
You know it's my job to visualize, what is literal or audible, so I designed all the characters, and I designed what they do and how they should do it and so on.
If 300 million people were to offer up the details of their private lives, you would need to hire another 300 million people just to keep up.
We would sift through every inch of what it was that worked, or if it didn't, and wonder what was effective in it, in terms of paint, the subject matter, the size, the drawing.
Matisse was very clear about saying that you have to blow your own trumpet and explain yourself, which I think has been slightly forgotten.
I fell through a crack for years. Historically, I am a nothing because I fit in no category. I can only be me.
A young woman has young claws, well sharpened. If she has character, that is. And if she hasn't so much the worse for you.
I feel the need of attaining the maximum of intensity with the minimum of means. It is this which has led me to give my painting a character of even greater bareness.
It doesn't make much difference how the paint is put on as long as something has been said. Technique is just a means of arriving at a statement.
A person with normal eyesight would have nothing to know in the way of 'Impressionism' unless he were in a blinding light or in the dusk or dark.
The vast majority of English folk cannot and will not consider a picture as a picture, apart from any story which it may be supposed to tell.
It helped me in the air to keep my small mind contained in earthly human limits, not lost in vertiginous space and elements unknown.
A piece of wall can be visually disintegrated from the whole into a separate triangle by plunging a diagonal of light from edge to edge on the wall; that is, side to floor, for instance.
Realizing this, I knew that the actual space of a room could be broken down and played with by planting illusions of real light (electric light) at crucial junctures in the room's composition.
I really don't understand the idea of a celebrity stylist. Is it a real job? I know there's unemployment, but frankly the railways need to be fixed, too.
