Bram van Velde - Life Quotes

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Painting is an aid to vision. It turns life, the complexity of life, into something visible. It reveals things that we don't know how to see.

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
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
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
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
Life and mind are continuously in conflict with each other. I want happiness, security. I won't reach that by considerations of my mind; on the contrary they will lead to a certain despair of the inner person. Not what he thinks engages the artist, but what he feels.

Bram van Velde
Each of my paintings is a cycle. It's like existence, life. They are always in motion... If they were fixed and static, they would be false.

Bram van Velde
Of course painting is ridiculous. But it's the only way I've got to get closer to life.

Bram van Velde
Artists who are the defenders of true life become phonies. That's the perfidious thing about this world. Society turns anyone with a bit of life inside them into a medical case.

Bram van Velde
I'm now in a big working period, which takes me up so much that hardly anything of me remains. I have never been strong in theories and this becomes worse and worse. My work should give me satisfaction, and that is about life and death... Several paintings full of life and beauty arose again and give me the courage and joy to proceed on the road. There are also several paintings in which I am involved for less than half, discharges in a short time, which have existence for a while, but will not reach shaping.

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
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
I can't say or explain anything. Pictures don't come from your head but from life... I am always looking for life. All that escapes thought or will-power.

Bram van Velde
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.

Bram van Velde