More Quotes on Art

Image: Gabrielle Jones, "Eucalypt" 2010, Ink on Paper 100 x 75cm

“Art is the loftiest yearning for truth, happiness and life or whatever you may call it. This is truly the most perfect form of our humanity”. Gerhard Richter

“(Paint) is this physical thing, yet you use it as a transforming agent…..The paint really makes the image. The paint discovers the image.” Elizabeth Murray

Illusion is our natural space of being human. We construct multiple realities” Brook Andrew, Australian artist

"What makes a great painter? The sentiments the painter’s works instil is of more value than any thought they may contain. To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your own private heart is true for all men – that is genius. Speak your latent conviction, and it shall be the universal sense; for the inmost, in due time, becomes the outmost” Ralph Waldo Emmerson, on Self reliance.

“You can’t do anything you want, but having the fantasy you can is important when you’re making a work. I think that tension – that tension of wanting to do it and not being able to do it-is exactly where art is” Elizabeth Murray

“When I was a student at the Art Students League in New York City, I was surrounded by groups of artists, all investigating the comparable similarities and likenesses between things. It was not until I realised that it is the celebration of the differences between things that I became an artist who could see….I was looking for what most people can’t see. If I am a successful artist, then I think you don’t need Art. Art is then an appreciation of your own life.” Robert Rauschenberg.

“There is nothing original – all you can do is make an authentic forgery.” Luc Tuymans

“I have nothing to say, and I am saying it” John Cage

Artist 's Quotes on Process

Image: Gabrielle Jones, "Shade, Speed and the Distance" 2010 Oil on Canvas, 152 x 122cm

“The notion of not having to get to a destination makes everything a possible destination.... If you have no certainty about how something is going to develop, then you go through the whole process of witnessing its development”. Robert Rauschenberg

“(Jasper Johns) uses paint as an active kind of layering. He moulds it. Glues things on, and uses templates until the paint begins to have a concreteness, which reminds me of Cezanne”. Elizabeth Murray

“I find it, then I go looking for what it is.” Picasso (on his choice of subjects and shifts of style)

“One should accept all givens, and move on from there” John Cage

“Of course I constantly despair at my own incapacity, at the impossibility of ever accomplishing anything, of painting a valid, true picture or even knowing what such a thing ought to look like. But then I always have the hope that, if I persevere, it might one day happen…..I have no motif, only motivation” Gerhard Richter, 1985