20th-century Artist Quotes

Look around you. Everywhere. They are there. In every home - lurking in dark corners … small, bi-pedal entities with almost human brains play their games in which adults are the pawns. They play and wait for the time when they will take over the world!

On children

John Blair Moore

In the end I realize that whatever meaning that picture has is the accumulated meaning of ten thousand brushstrokes, each one being decided as it was painted.

Robert Motherwell

If it hurt me to have to give up a painting I figured it had to hurt them to write the check. That's how I came up with the price for my work.

The worst thing is to feel that as a photographer I'm benefiting from someone else's tragedy. This idea haunts me. It's something I have to reckon with every day, because I know that if I ever allow genuine compassion to be overtaken by personal ambition, I will have sold my soul. The only way I can justify my role is to have respect for the other person's predicament. The extent to which I do that is the extent to which I become accepted by the other and to that extent I can accept myself.

The artist's main business is to train his eye to see, then to probe and then to train his hand to work in sympathy with his eye. I have a habit of looking, and really seeing.

Who is an artist? I say we take a title. No one gives it to us. We make our lives.

Louise Nevelson

What I find interesting is working in a society with certain taboos — and fashion photography is about that kind of society. To have taboos, then to get around them — that is interesting.

Realism' has been abandoned in the search for reality: the 'principal objective' of abstract art is precisely this reality.

I believe in goodness
Mercy and charity
I believe in a universal spirit
I believe in casting bread
Upon the waters

If I were the type of artist that didn't care whether or not my works communicated with viewers then I wouldn't bother exhibiting them, I might as well stock them in a warehouse. But I do exhibit and I do care because I want to communicate back to the viewer what I've viewed. My paintings are inspired by my homeland's traditional spaces. My colors are the colors of monasteries and mosques, the color of ruins of Sassanid and Seljuq era, colors of Bazaars of Isfahan and Shiraz, and colors of northern-Iran's ceramics. I have sensed all these colors, forms and everything within my painting's frame from the viewer's own world.

Audiences want to support artists. Which is pretty much how it's always been except during the last 100 years where it's turned into this really vicious, cutthroat, nasty business with all these blood-thirsty, parasitic middle-men. But historically, artists were relatively poor and supported directly by their audiences. There's a great book called The Gift by Lewis Hyde. You know, art is a gift and it turns out the audience is happy to give back.

Rarely if ever does one feel sure one knows enough to go ahead with much of anything new. You bank on faith and courage and the ability to learn on the job.

Cornelia Parker

Through her, in microcosm, the wide earth sobbed. The starglobe sank in her; the colours faded. The death-dew rose and the wild birds in her breast climbed to her throat and gathered songless, hovering, all tumult, wing to wing, so ardent for those climes where all things end.

I'm the type of person that likes to dream big, and I've often found that every great journey begins with a dream

The pictures I contemplate painting would constitute a halfway state and attempt to point out the direction of the future - without arriving there completely

Jackson Pollock

A zebra can't drive a moon-buggy. Or any other sort of car for that matter.

What the fuck is DC anyway? They'd be better off calling it AOL Comics. At least people know what AOL is. I mean, they have Batman and Superman, and they don't know what to do with them. That's like being a porn star with the biggest dick and you can't get it up. What the fuck?

Not all the war correspondents [in Afghanistan] were nervous. My wife asked a journalist covering the Khanabad front why he didn't wear a bulletproof vest. (At $1,200 each, we couldn't afford them.) "Are you kidding?" the heavyset photographer for The San Jose Mercury News replied as he wiped his brow. "It's too hot out here."

For me, painting means the continuation of dreaming by other means.

Painting is always strongest when in spite of composition, color, etc., it appears as a fact, or an inevitability, as opposed to a souvenir or arrangement.

Robert Rauschenberg

Indian contemporary artists have not come to this standard. So I feel happy that I could present something to them. My work has a different meaning and something like this has never been done by any other Indian artist.

Only a bad artist thinks he has a good idea. A good artist does not need anything.

Anyone who enjoys inner peace is no more broken by failure as he is inflated by success. He is able to fully live his experiences in the context of a vast and profound serenity, since he understands that experiences are ephemeral and that it is useless to cling to them.

Matthieu Ricard

The political topicality of my October paintings means almost nothing to me, but in many reviews it is the first or only thing that arouses interest, and the response to the pictures varies according to current political circumstance. I find this rather a distraction.

Gerhard Richter

I feel as though I have lived many lives, experienced the heights and depths of each and like the waves of the ocean, never known rest. Throughout the years, I looked always for the unusual, for the wonderful, for the mysteries at the heart of life.

Leni Riefenstahl