Gottfried Helnwein Quotes

9 Sourced Quotes

Most societies are ruled by mediocre people that have no vision and no imagination. Most rulers are scared of creation and creative people. Artists are funny people. All they want is to touch and move, challenge and surprise others. But dictators hate surprises more than anything else. All they want is to turn their territory into a neat little toy prison camp and play with their little toy people. Push them around, rip a leg or a head off now and then or throw them into the garbage when they are tired of their stupid, little doll faces.

Gottfried Helnwein
My question always was: why do people always cause so much pain to other people? Why does everybody look so hurt? When I started to paint I didn't feel I had any message. My art was not an answer – it was a question.

Gottfried Helnwein
In retrospect I would say from Donald Duck I have learned more about life than from all the schools I ever attended.

Gottfried Helnwein
The first time I saw a picture of Elvis - I was in a state of shock, because I couldn't believe that a human being could be so beautiful.

Gottfried Helnwein
Art is a weapon for me, with which I can strike back.

Gottfried Helnwein
"High" and "low" are completely arbitrary and artificial distinctions that some bloated assholes invented to make life more complicated. Comics are considered "low", but when Roy Lichtensein comes and picks out one panel of a comic, projects and paints it on a canvas then it's suddenly "high" art? Give me a break. The only thing that I care about in art is quality, intensity. Is a work of art capable of touching and moving me? Does it cause an emotional impact on me? Does it startle, surprise, upset, excite me? Does it make me think? Does it inspire me? Does it stimulate my imagination? Does it change the way I view the world to some degree?

Gottfried Helnwein
When I started to paint, I painted children because I just felt that I wanted to take their side. What always upset me was how children are getting abused simply because they are physically weaker and not capable of defending themselves – how they get raped, enslaved and killed. I never understood why some people seemed to have fun causing pain to someone smaller.

Gottfried Helnwein
Opening my first Donald Duck comic book felt like seeing the daylight again for someone who had been trapped underground by a mine-disaster for many days. I squinted cautiously because my eyes hadn't gotten used to the dazzlingly bright sun of Duckburg yet, and I greedily sucked the fresh breeze into my dusty lungs that came drifting over from Uncle Scrooge's money bin. I was back home again, in a decent world where one could get flattened by steam-rollers and perforated by bullets without serious harm. A world in which people still looked proper, with yellow beaks or black knobs instead of noses. And it was here that I met the man who would forever change my life - Donald Duck.

Gottfried Helnwein
Imaginations and illusions are always so much more powerful and bigger than this mediocre and boring thing called reality.

Gottfried Helnwein