20th-century Painter Quotes

Paint is the only weapon I have with which to fight what I resent. If I could write, I would write about it. If I could talk, I would talk about it. Since I paint, I must paint about it.

Charles Wilbert White

Simplicity: The New Competitive Advantage in a World of More, Better, Faster.

You can write a letter with a typewriter, a pencil, or a crayon. What you have to say is the important thing.

Clio may be the most austere and chaste of the Muses, but she has been known to come down informally from Mount Helicon in a mood so raffish that there are those who claim to have seen her with her slip showing.

Thornton Willis

Everything that you paint may be used as evidence against you.

Pierre Alechinsky

I never take photographs myself. I don't feel like a photographer, more like a recycler

Christian Boltanski

My greatest fortune was that I was ordered to take up art for the good of my health

Kyffin Williams

When I lived in Cookham I was disturbed by a feeling of everything being meaningless. But quite suddenly I became aware that everything was full of special meaning and this made everything holy... I observed this sacred quality in most unexpected quarters.

Stanley Spencer

If these gouaches [Bram van Velde recently made] live at all, it is because they are true, they derive from life. They are born of the unknown – and not of habit or know-how, or intention, or of some recipe.... there comes a time when serious work is no longer an effort. When demanding work of that kind no longer tires you.

You can love a woman. To admire her is hard. You are not dealing with something important.

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

What is spiritual experience? A snowflake melting, a bee sucking honey, a fat man at a traffic light. Trivia.

Frederick Franck

Small pictures since the Renaissance are like novels; large pictures are like dramas in which one participates in a direct way.

The day I joined this Israeli and Arabs youth movement, my life began to get complicated. Suddenly it was no longer black and white.

Jonathan Kis-Lev

If a painting of mine suits me, it is right. If it does not please me, I care not if all the great masters should approve it or the dealers buy it. They would be wrong.

The greatest travelers have not gone beyond the limits of their own world; they have trodden the paths of their own souls, of good and evil, of morality and redemption.

Photography, because it stops the flow of life, is always flirting with death.

I do consider my engaged poetry as a personal mission, a duty towards a society which evolves into a system of control of consciences: one even becomes a suspect for not thinking correctly!

Whether its [David] Berkowitz, whether its [Ted] Bundy, whether its Williams, Wayne Williams down in Atlanta or any of the others, or Charlie Manson—I don't comment about other cases for the simple fact is that I wasn't there.

John Wayne Gacy

I'll be in Detroit two more weeks. I would like to tell you every thing that happened to me since the last time we saw each other, but most of them are sad and you mustn't know sad things now. After all I shouldn't complain because I have been happy in many ways though. Diego is good to me, and you can't imagine how happy he has been working on the frescoes here. I have been painting a little too and that helped. I thought of you a lot and never forget your wonderful hands and the color of your eyes. I will see you soon. I am sure that in New York I will be much happier. If you still in the hospital when I come back I will bring you flowers.

I work from the people that interest me, and that I care about, in rooms that I live in and know. I use the people to invent my pictures, and I can work more freely when they are there.

I'm an average nobody. I get to live the rest of my life like a schnook.

We are getting mixed up with the French tradition. In talking about the necessity to 'finish' a thing, we then said American painters 'finish' a thing that looks 'unfinished', and the French, they 'finish' it. I have seen Henri Matisse's that were more 'unfinished' and yet more 'finished' than any American painters. Matisse was obviously in a terrific emotion at the time and he was more 'unfinished' than 'finished'.

William Baziotes

Sex, like art, can unsettle a soul, can grind a heart in a mortar. Sex, like literature, can sneak the other within one's wall, even if only for a moment, a moment before one immures oneself again.

Rabih Alameddine

The first and most important thing is to remain free, free in each line you undertake, in your ideas and in your political action, in your moral conduct. The artist especially must remain free from all outer restraints.