Authors
Topics
Lists
Pictures
Resources
More about Bram van Velde
Bram van Velde Quotes
80 Sourced Quotes
Source
Report...
I am powerless, helpless. Each time it's a leap in the dark. A deliberate encounter with the unknown.
Bram van Velde
Source
Report...
I don't know if I've got close enough [in two recent paintings he made] to what I was really trying to achieve. But at least I've tried, I've made the attempt. I've done what I could. I've gone as far as my powers permitted.
Bram van Velde
Source
Report...
The greatest moment is when you realize that the painting you've just finished is nothing. When you manage to detach yourself from it.
Bram van Velde
Source
Report...
Perhaps he Mondrian was too faithful to a single discovery. And perhaps that kind of painting was right for the period. But now peace and harmony are no longer possible. There is only anguish.
Bram van Velde
Source
Report...
I don't like talking. I don't like people talking to me... Painting is silence.
Bram van Velde
Source
Report...
When you are working, you are so far away and so absorbed, it's inevitable that you fall into a vacuum when you stop.... every time when I finish a painting, I always have to wait to get my strength back before I can begin another.
Bram van Velde
Source
Report...
Painting is being alive. Through my painting, I beat back this world that stops us living and where we are in constant danger of being destroyed... No, you have to know when to keep silent.
Bram van Velde
Source
Report...
I don't set out to speak a comprehensible language. But my language is authentic.
Bram van Velde
Source
Report...
Creating a painting is a matter of ensuring that all its parts achieve unity. Though it's a precarious, fragile unity.
Bram van Velde
Source
Report...
What the eye can see won't get us very far. And what it can see is so limited, so restricted. But a gouache or an oil painting can be seen at a glance, can take in a whole world at a single glance.
Bram van Velde
Source
Report...
What makes a painting fascinating is its sincerity. Sincerity is such a rare thing. Most people don't dare to be sincere.
Bram van Velde
Source
Report...
I met Beckett at my brother's (Geert van Velde, also an abstract painter) place. That was a Big meeting [circa 1938, in Paris], in capital letters. It was before war started, life was still normal. That time I was very lonely. We saw each other often. Before the war he had published already something, but his fame came in 1953. We never spoke about his work. He was a taciturn man. Sometimes a word escaped from his mouth. Sure, a word you would never forget. It would stick in your head... This friendship with Beckett is the most important experience in my life. He was fully alive for my way of working. What he could express in words, I did with my paintings.
Bram van Velde
Source
Report...
Part of your work feels as clear, it gives you a sense of liberation or beauty and you recognize it as necessary pavements. You are thus in a sense ready. In the other part of your work this is not the case. Therein is the hidden development, which is the true essence of art... the higher purpose, the pursuit forward that art automatically calls. The unclear part of your work needs to progress (stopping is no option, is no life, no art) and it is clear when by working with head and heart, the real step forward has been achieved.
Bram van Velde
Source
Report...
The most difficult thing is when you can't do anything. When you just have to wait.
Bram van Velde
Source
Report...
Painting lives only through the slide towards the unknown in oneself.
Bram van Velde
Source
Report...
An artist's life is all very fine and moving. But only in retrospect. In books.
Bram van Velde
Source
Report...
When I am painting, driven by lively tensions, I want to express what's going on in me. When that tension has ceased, when the life in me became visible, then something happened which had to happen. Over and over again you experience a work which is created in this way. What happened? It is hard to say, because it was not my mind that led but the inner desire that revealed its inner life.
Bram van Velde
Source
Report...
I am well aware that a painting must inevitably be a bizarre, incomprehensible thing.
Bram van Velde
Source
Report...
When I look back to a recent painting, I can hardly bear th suffering in it.
Bram van Velde
Source
Report...
Picasso.... the master.... being a master: 'I don't search, I find' [a famous quote of Picasso, where he criticize the 'searching' artists].. the master, the mastery.... Producing, producing... He [Picasso!] only knows how to work, can't do anything else. What lost souls!... The great risk is producing for its own sake. You must never force things. You just have to wait.
Bram van Velde
Source
Report...
To be true, you have to take the plunge, to touch bottom. But most people want to be in control. They fear the worst. You can't control anything. What you have to do is let yourself be taken over... All the paintings I have made, I was compelled to make. You must never force yourself.
Bram van Velde
Source
Report...
In the first piece that you Beckett wrote about me [circa 1946], you never once used the word color. That was important. I was struck by it.
Bram van Velde
Source
Report...
However terrible it is, the thing never involves any sadness
Bram van Velde
Source
Report...
Painting is getting in touch with the truth. It's a matter of summoning up the vision I need.
Bram van Velde
Source
Report...
When you get to the bottom, you discover that there is no room for pride. That's what I paint.
Bram van Velde
1
2
3
4
Quote of the day
No longer shall I paint interiors with men reading and women knitting. I will paint living people who breathe and feel and suffer and love.
Edvard Munch
Bram van Velde
Creative Commons
Born:
October 19, 1895
Died:
December 28, 1981
(aged 86)
Bio:
Bram van Velde was a Dutch painter known for an intensely colored and geometric semi-representational painting style related to Tachisme, and Lyrical Abstraction.
Most used words:
painting
life
work
time
art
people
true
artists
mind
beauty
live
truth
paint
strength
living
Bram van Velde on Wikipedia
Suggest an edit or a new quote
Bram van Velde Quotes
Bram van Velde Short Quotes
Dutch Painter Quotes
Painter Quotes
20th-century Painter Quotes
Related People
Joan Miró
Spanish Sculptor
Pierre Alechinsky
Belgian Painter
Featured Authors
Lists
Predictions that didn't happen
If it's on the Internet it must be true
Remarkable Last Words (or Near-Last Words)
Picture Quotes
Confucius
Philip James Bailey
Eleanor Roosevelt
Letitia Elizabeth Landon
Popular Topics
life
love
nature
time
god
power
human
mind
work
art
heart
thought
men
day
×
Lib Quotes