Bram van Velde - Painting Quotes

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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
Painting, an oeuvre, is not such a big deal, it is so unimportant. But that's precisely what makes it interesting.

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
There is only the present. A painting is an instant of time that has escaped oblivion.

Bram van Velde
Painting doesn't interest me... What I paint is beyond painting.

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
It is important to see that my paintings are ultimately stimulating. They are not at all the kind of thing that inspires despair.

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

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
Mondrian? His mind was too subtle. He worked in the light. I work in the darkness... Mondrian is the Buddha of painting. I saw him once. You wondered how a man could radiate such charisma.

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

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 like talking. I don't like people talking to me... Painting is silence.

Bram van Velde
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
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
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
The real horror is mass production. Painting when there is no compulsion to do so… …Pictures like that are all unpunished crimes.

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

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

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

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

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
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
Through painting I try to get closer to nothingness, to the void.

Bram van Velde
Oh Baudelaire... He used to be enormously important to me. It's thanks to him that I was able to get through the war [in Paris, during 1940 – 1945 Van Velde had a long and painful break, with only a few paintings he finished]. A true loyal mind without hypocrisy. The most universal spirit. The greatest Frenchman. I have always been much less interested in painters [than Baudelaire - a great surprise to hear for Charles Juliet the interviewer].

Bram van Velde