Sculptor Quotes

It is personality with a penny's worth of talent. Error which chances to rise above the commonplace.

We all know that Art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize the truth, at least the truth that is given to us to understand.

Today we haven't the heart to expel the painters and poets from society because we refuse to admit to ourselves that there is any danger in keeping them in our midst.

Art is a finger up the bourgeoisie ass.

Good artists copy, great artists steal.

When you make a thing, a thing that is new, it is so complicated making it that it is bound to be ugly. But those that make it after you, they don't have to worry about making it. And they can make it pretty, and so everybody can like it when others make it after you

The people who make art their business are mostly imposters.

It isn't up to the painter to define the symbols. Otherwise it would be better if he wrote them out in so many words! The public who look at the picture must interpret the symbols as they understand them.

When I haven't any blue I use red.

Only put off until tomorrow what you are willing to die having left undone.

To be young, really young, takes a very long time.

[In developing your potential] ... I don't develop; I am

Painting is not done to decorate apartments. It is an instrument of war.

Love must be proven by facts and not by reasons.

An artist must be very careful not to look for models. As soon as one artist takes another as model, he is lost. There is no other point of departure than reality.

I have a horror of people who speak about the beautiful. What is the beautiful? One must speak of problems in painting!

In the end there is only Matisse.

You cannot go against nature. She is stronger than the strongest of men. We can permit ourselves some liberties, but in details only.

Who sees the human face correctly: the photographer, the mirror, or the painter?

It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child.

I'm a joker who has understood his epoch and has extracted all he possibly could from the stupidity, greed and vanity of his contemporaries.

We don't grow older, we grow riper.

I am always doing that which I cannot do, in order that I may learn how to do it.

Art is a leap into the dark.

Have you noticed that bones are always modeled and not carved, that you always have the impression they come from a mold, that they were first modeled in clay? Any bone you look at, you always find fingerprints on it.

Why should I copy this owl, this sea urchin? Why should I try to imitate nature? I might just as well try to trace a perfect circle.

The first half of life is learning to be an adult-the second half is learning to be a child.

I want to get to the stage where nobody can tell how a picture of mine is done. What's the point of that? Simply that I want nothing but emotion given off by it.

When I am finished painting, I paint again for relaxation.

To me there is no past or future in art. If a work of art does not live in the present, it must not be considered at all.

I must keep on trying, just to keep the experiment going until I get tired of it all. Even if the last result is not necessarily the best, I stop when my interest in the problem wanes.

Never permit a dichotomy to rule your life, a dichotomy in which you hate what you do so you can have pleasure in your spare time. Look for a situation in which your work will give you as much happiness as your spare time.

If you don't know what color to take, take black.

The hidden harmony is better than the obvious.

The artist is a receptacle for emotions that come from all over the place: from the sky, from the earth, from a scrap of paper, from a passing shape, from a spider's web.

People are always asking me to sign my old canvases. It's ridiculous!

Beauty? To me it is a word without sense because I do not know where its meaning comes from nor where it leads to.

Age only matters when one is aging. Now that I have arrived at a great age, I might as well be twenty.

The trouble is, we've been taught what to see and how to render what we see. If only we could be in the position of those men who did those wonderful drawings in Lascaux and Altimira!

That inspiration comes, does not depend on me. The only thing I can do is make sure it catches me working.

A painter paints to unload himself of feelings and visions.

When I am told I am too old to do something, I try to do it right away.

They ought to put out the eyes of painters as they do goldfinches in order that they can sing better.

There's nothing more difficult than a line.

I see for others... in order to put on canvas the sudden apparitions which come to me.

Art is a lie that makes us realise truth ... that is given us to understand.

I understand my own pictures best six months after I have done them.

All things considered, there is only Matisse.

Motivation is in the world around us. We have an infinite amount of material at our disposal, in the lives of those we meet, in what we see and feel, in what we discuss and from the passion of every woman.

If only we could pull out our brain and use only our eyes.

If you have five elements available use only four. If you have four elements use three.

A good picture, any picture, has to be bristling with razor blades.

What I find horrible nowadays is that people are always trying to find a personality for themselves. Nobody bothers about what you might call a painter's ideal... the kind that's always existed... No. They couldn't care less about that.

...why did Plato say that poets should be chased out of the republic? Precisely because every poet and every artist is an antisocial being. He's not that way because he wants to be; he can't be any other way.... and if he really is an artist it is in his nature not to want to be admitted, because if he is admitted it can only mean he is doing something which is understood, approved, and therefore old hat - worthless. Anything new, anything worth doing, can't be recognized.

Are we to paint what's on the face, what's inside the face, or what's behind it?

When I paint a woman in an armchair, the armchair is there to show illness and death-or as a protection.

The connoisseur of painting gives only bad advice to the painter. For that reason I have given up trying to judge myself.

You can't escape your own period. Whether you take sides for or against, you're always in it.

Why do two colors, put one next to the other, sing?

The more technique you have, the less you have to worry about it. The more technique there is, the less there is.