Quotes to inspire and reflect

A good painter is to paint two main things, men and the working of man’s mind.

Good painting is the kind that looks like sculpture.

Painting is the grandchild of nature. It is related to God.

I experience a period of frightening clarity in those moments when nature is so beautiful. I am no longer sure of myself, and the paintings appear as in a dream.

A structure becomes architectural, and not sculptural, when its elements no longer have their justification in nature.

An architect should live as little in cities as a painter. Send him to our hills, and let him study there what nature understands by a buttress, and what by a dome.

Ah, to build, to build! That is the noblest of all the arts.

The principle of Gothic architecture is infinity made imaginable.

Architecture has recorded the great ideas of the human race. Not only every religious symbol, but every human thought has its page in that vast book.

Architecture is the work of nations.

The secret of many of my deformations—which many people do not understand—is that there is an interaction, an intereffect between the lines in a painting: one line attracts the other and at the point of maximum attraction the lines curve in toward the attracting point and form is altered.

I see only forms that are lit up and forms that are not. There is only light and shadow.

Technical knowledge is not enough. One must transcend techniques so that art becomes an artless art, growing out of the unconscious.

Technique is just a means of arriving at a statement.

Focusing totally on technique, you lose the essence and power of simplicity … The other extreme is just as bad; you see it in a lot of Modern works, where the concept is more important than the technique, resulting in very poor craftsmanship.

Techniques vary; art stays the same: it is a transposition of nature at once forceful and sensitive.

A painting is finished when the artist says it is finished.

When I am in my painting, I am not aware of what I’m doing. It is only after a sort of “get acquainted” period that I see what I have been about. I have no fears about making changes, destroying the image, etc., because the painting has a life of its own. I try to let it come through.

Allow your judgments a silent, undisturbed development, which, like all progress, must come from deep within and cannot be forced or hastened.

Nothing can be done except little by little.

I’ve always refused requests, even from friends, to employ a technique I know nothing about.

The right man is the one who seizes the moment.

It is only after years of preparation that the young [artist] should touch color— not color used descriptively, that is, but as a means of personal expression.

For a long time I limited myself to one color—as a form of discipline.

Pictures must not be too picturesque.

When you write—explode—fly apart— disintegrate! Then give time enough to think, cut, rework, and rewrite.

I begin with an idea and then it becomes something else.

A line is a dot that went for a walk.

The line between failure and success is so fine that we scarcely know when we pass it—so fine that we often are on the line and do not know it.

I’ve failed again!

People need trouble—a little frustration to sharpen the spirit on, toughen it. Artists do; I don’t mean you need to live in a rat hole or gutter, but you have to learn fortitude, endurance. Only vegetables are happy.

Those who are willing to be vulnerable move among mysteries.

Anxiety is the handmaiden of creativity.

No one but myself knows the anxiety I go through and the trouble I give myself to finish paintings which do not satisfy me and seem to please so very few others.

I felt so insufficiently equipped, so unprepared, so weak, and at the same time it seemed to me that my reflections on art were correct. I quarreled with all the world and with myself.

Doubt, of whatever kind, can be ended by action alone.

Oh, you weak, beautiful people who give up with such grace. What you need is someone to take hold of you—gently, with love, and hand your life back to you.

I am no artist—please come and help me.

I always have a curious sort of feeling about some of my things—I hate to show them—I am perfectly inconsistent about it—I am afraid people won’t understand—and I hope they won’t—and am afraid they will.

Just dash something down if you see a blank canvas staring at you with a certain imbecility. You do not know how paralyzing it is, that staring of a blank canvas, which says to the painter: you don’t know anything.

Ask for no guarantees; ask for no security; there never was such an animal. And if there were, it would be related to the great sloth, which hangs upside down in a tree all day every day, sleeping its life away.

Without fear and illness, I could never have accomplished all I have.

Don’t give in to your fears. If you do, you won’t be able to talk to your heart.

I am the first to be surprised and often terrified by the images that I see appear on my canvas.

Even the knowledge of my own fallibility cannot keep me from making mistakes. Only when I fall do I get up again.

An artist, a man, a failure, must proceed.

You fail only if you stop …

One must be a god to be able to tell successes from failures without making a mistake.