I went back to my own idioms, envisioned, created, and thought through. And the insight and the momentum established altered the character of the whole concept of the practice of painting.
Clyfford Still
In my paintings I’m not inventing; my ideas come
from constantly investigating how things look.
ElIsworth Kelly
We will only be free as photographers when we share the freedom that painting has. We must see the world in a more personal way, more condensed. Interpret life, not record it.
James Fee
A guilty conscience needs to confess. A work of art is a confession.
Albert Camus, from Notebooks I (1935-42)
I have no ideas about what the paintings imply about the world. I don’t think that’s a painter’s business. He just paints paintings without a conscious reason.
Jasper Johns
Colour is the key. The eye is the hammer. The soul is the piano with its many chords. The artist is the hand that, by touching this or that key, sets the soul vibrating automatically.
Wassily Kandinsky (1866–1944)
When the critics do not agree among themselves, the artist is in accord with himself.
oscar wilde [Irish writer 1854-1900]
Living in the Plains, you’d see surreal things; you’d see mirages. I’m sitting on the front porch, as a little kid at sunset, and the sun is in back of me, and walking across the horizon is a Trojan horse four stories tall. I go “Uh oh—what’s that?” So I run into the house and say, “Look! Look at the big horse!” It was the neighbor’s white stallion, which had got loose, caught the light in the heat, and it looked four stories tall. These kinds of little things make, I think, the curiosity, or the inquisitiveness, that make and artist.
James Rosenquist
