Bram van Velde Quotes

80 Sourced Quotes

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
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
I don't set out to speak a comprehensible language. But my language is authentic.

Bram van Velde
Creating a painting is a matter of ensuring that all its parts achieve unity. Though it's a precarious, fragile unity.

Bram van Velde
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
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
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
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
The most difficult thing is when you can't do anything. When you just have to wait.

Bram van Velde
Painting lives only through the slide towards the unknown in oneself.

Bram van Velde
An artist's life is all very fine and moving. But only in retrospect. In books.

Bram van Velde
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
I am well aware that a painting must inevitably be a bizarre, incomprehensible thing.

Bram van Velde
When I look back to a recent painting, I can hardly bear th suffering in it.

Bram van Velde
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
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
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
However terrible it is, the thing never involves any sadness

Bram van Velde
Painting is getting in touch with the truth. It's a matter of summoning up the vision I need.

Bram van Velde
When you get to the bottom, you discover that there is no room for pride. That's what I paint.

Bram van Velde
Painting is an eye, a blinded eye that continues to see, and sees what blinds it.... this tiny little thing, which is nothing, which dominates life.

Bram van Velde
Van Gogh... In this world of petty calculations, he was too intense. He frightened people. They cast him out.

Bram van Velde
Art is not for the personal satisfaction of one or the other, but art wants to return all what's in life... Art wants to give back everything what's in our lives. The more comprehensive the artist stands in life the more powerful his work will speak, and therefore a work of art is a measure of the mental size of his creator.

Bram van Velde
It is true that other people can help you, and to lasting effect... If I hadn't had Beckett in 1940 [in Paris, when Van Velde was strongly demoralized by the death of his wife], I'm not sure I could have stood it. I am really not sure... At that time he [Beckett] he was driven by an extremely aggressive and fiery Irish spirit. That has lessened as time has gone on... I don't know anywhere in modern art any more faithful or more impressive picture of contemporary humanity than the one he offers us in 'The Unamable'.

Bram van Velde
I feel myself tied to life. To the immensity and complexity of life. Each painting is an impulse towards life.

Bram van Velde
Everyone cheats. Only artists don't. They don't fool people and they aren't fooled. They are outside all that. Nobody can understand them.

Bram van Velde
At is taking risks.... a sincere attempt to achieve the impossible, the unknown.

Bram van Velde
In this world that destroys me, the only thing that I can do is to live my weakness. That weakness is my only strength.

Bram van Velde
Painting is so stupid, so simple. I paint to get out of the through. I paint my misery.

Bram van Velde
I start off on the canvas and, little by little, it imposes its own solution. But that solution is not easy to find.

Bram van Velde