From the moment I held the box of colors in my hands, I knew this was my life. I threw myself into it like a beast that plunges towards the thing it loves.
Not that painting would have been a release. The reason for doing it is the desire to create. I've got to do it! I've seen that, I can still remember it, I've got to paint it.
It's hardly even noticeable that so many artists, designers and architects live here. It isn't reflected in the cityscape or in the museums. Many of the artists, for example, exhibit around the world, just not in Berlin.
Color possesses me. I don't have to pursue it. It will possess me always, I know it. That is the meaning of this happy hour: Color and I are one. I am a painter.
Everything vanishes around me, and works are born as if out of the void. Ripe, graphic fruits fall off. My hand has become the obedient instrument of a remote will.
In the final analysis, a drawing simply is no longer a drawing, no matter how self-sufficient its execution may be. It is a symbol, and the more profoundly the imaginary lines of projection meet higher dimensions, the better.
All day long, I'm creative, and the second I get a little tired of any given medium, I just shut that area down and go to the next room. I just go do something else.
Painting is a blind man's profession. He paints not what he sees, but what he feels, what he tells himself about what he has seen.
When I was a child my mother said to me, 'If you become a soldier, you'll be a general. If you become a monk, you'll be the pope.' Instead I became a painter and wound up as Picasso.
I worked three and then six hours a day in my studio with strict discipline and emotion. I obtained awards usually granted to other foreigners during the end-of-year admission tests.
I don't follow any system. All the laws you can lay down are only so many props to be cast aside when the hour of creation arrives.
Art is the giving by each man of his evidence to the world. Those who wish to give, love to give, discover the pleasure of giving. Those who give are tremendously strong.
Because we are saturated with life, because we are human, our strongest motive is life, humanity; and the stronger the motive back of the line the stronger, and therefore more beautiful, the line will be.
The sketch hunter moves through life as he finds it, not passing negligently the things he loves, but stopping to know them, and to note them down in the shorthand of his sketchbook.
The undercurrent and motive of all art is an individual man's idea. From each we expect what he has to give. We desire it. It is absolutely necessary for him to give it out.
Sometimes we do grip the concert in a human head, and so hold it that in a way we get a record of it into paint, but the vision and expressing of one day will not do for the next.
Don't worry about your originality. You couldn't get rid of it even if you wanted to. It will stick with you and show up for better or worse in spite of all you or anyone else can do.
I've always been fascinated by numbers. Before I was seventeen years old, I had lived in twenty-one different houses. In my mind, each of those houses had a number.
Most campaigns rely on photographs because the moment you do something that is a graphic interpretation where any artistic license has been taken, I think a lot of people are scared that it's going to be perceived as propaganda.
If you're sitting across the table from someone, the geometry of the situation says 'confrontation.' If you're walking with somebody, you're heading in the same direction, and the spatial dance you're doing is a little more cooperative.
There are some ghost stories in Japan where - when you are sitting in the bathroom in the traditional style of the Japanese toilet - a hand is actually starting to grab you from beneath. It's a very scary story.
