Studio Project: The Painting Experience

“It is far easier to debate about realistic painting than to paint one.” ~ Igor Babailov

“I deny that art can be taught, or, in other words, maintain that art is completely individual, and that the talent of each artist is but the result of his own inspiration and his own study of past tradition.” ~ Gustave Courbet

“Beauty, like truth, is relative to the time when one lives and to the individual who can grasp it.” ~ Gustave Courbet

“The beautiful is in nature, and it is encountered under the most diverse forms of reality. Once it is found, it belongs to art, or rather to the artist who discovers it.”~ Gustave Courbet

“Painting is the representation of visible forms. The essence of realism is its negation of the ideal.” ~ Gustave Courbet

“Painting is an essentially concrete art and can only consist of real and existing things... an object which is abstract, not visible, non-existent, is not within the realm of painting.” ~ Gustave Courbet

“The most important things in a painting are Form and Value. Color comes last - like a friend you welcome.” ~ Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot

 “Pop is everything art hasn't been for the last two decades...It springs newborn out of a boredom with the finality and over-saturation of Abstract-Expressionism, which, by its own esthetic logic, is the END of art, the glorious pinnacle of the long pyramidal creative process. Stifled by this rarefied atmosphere, some young painters turn back to some less exalted things like Coca-Cola, ice-cream sodas, big hamburgers, super-markets and 'EAT' signs. They are eye-hungry; they pop....” ~ Robert Indiana

“Popular (designed for a mass audience); transient (short-term solution); expendable (easily forgotten); low cost; mass produced; young (aimed at youth); witty; sexy; gimmicky; glamorous; and last but not least, Big Business.” ~ Richard Hamilton

“I think a painting is more like the real world if it's made out the real world.” ~ Robert Rauschenberg

“The artist's job is to be a witness to his time in history.” ~ Robert Rauschenberg

“The artist has to be something like a whale swimming with his mouth wide open, absorbing everything until he has what he really needs.” ~ Romare Bearden

“The function of the artist is to organize the facets of life according to his imagination.” ~ Romare Bearden

“Everything is beautiful. Pop is everything.” ~ Andy Warhol

“Art is what you can get away with.” ~ Andy Warhol

“To me, art is the glorification of the human spirit.”  ~ Hans Hoffman

“My aim in painting is to create pulsating, luminous, and open surfaces that emanate a mystic light, in accordance with my deepest insight into the experience of life and nature.” ~ Hans Hoffman

“… the reciprocal relation of color to color produces a phenomenon of a more mysterious order. This new phenomenon is psychological. A high sensitivity is necessary in order to expand color into the sphere of the surreal without losing creative ground. Color stimulates certain moods in us (emphasized in Color Fieldpainting). It awakens joy or fear in accordance with its figuration. In fact, the whole world, as we experience it visually, comes to us through the mystic realm of color. Our entire being is nourished by it. This mystic quality of color should likewise find expression in a work of art.” ~ Hans Hoffman

“Painting, to me means forming with color.” ~ Hans Hoffman

“Colors must fit together as pieces in a puzzle or cogs in a wheel.” ~ Hans Hoffman

“In nature, light creates the color; in the picture, color creates light. Every color shade emanates a very characteristic light.. no substitute is possible.” ~ Hans Hoffman

“The ability to simplify means to eliminate the unnecessary so that the necessary may speak.” ~ Hans Hoffman

“Through a painting we can see the whole world.” ~ Hans Hoffman

“Art must not be intelligent; art is a jouisance, an enjoyment.” ~ Andre Derain

“You must think colour, have imagination with it. If you have no imagination you’ll never paint beautiful color. You must copy nature with imagination- that is what makes an artist. Colour must be thought, dreamt, imagined.” ~ Gustave Moreau, teacher Ecole des Beaux Arts

"We move towards serenity through the significance of ideas and form ... Details lessen the purity of lines, they harm the emotional intensity, and we choose to reject them. It is a question of learning - and perhaps relearning the 'handwriting' of lines. The aim of painting is not to reflect history, because this can be found in books. We have a higher conception. Through it, the artist expresses his inner vision." ~ Henri Matisse

"I don't follow any system. All the laws you can lay down are only so many props to be cast aside when the hour of creation arrives." ~ Raoul Dufy

“I heightened all tones. I transposed into an orchestration of pure colors all the feelings of which I was conscious. I was a barbarian, tender and full of violence. I translated by instinct, without any method, not merely an artistic truth but above all a human one.”~ Maurice de Vlaminck

“When the Fauvists held their first exhibit, the daring forms and vivid colors outraged the Paris art world. Critics stormed out and threw glasses of wine at some of the paintings. One critic, Marcel Dupree, was so aghast at the Fauvist paintings he vomited outside the gallery and took to his bed for several weeks.” ~  anonymous

Any number of holier-than-thou honorable realists walk around in the belief that they have accomplished something, simply because they tell you for the hundredth time that a field is green and a red-painted house is painted red. ~ Edvard Munch

If what you want to paint is the emotive mood in all its strength ... then you must not sit and stare at everything and depict it exactly as one sees it. ~ Edvard Munch

Blau Reiter

Art does not reproduce the visible; rather, it makes visible. ~ Paul Klee

Colour is a means of exerting direct influence on the soul. ~ Wassily Kandinsky

The impure men and women who surrounded me (and particularly the men), did not arouse any of my real feelings; while the natural feeling for life possessed by animals set in vibration everything good in me. ~ Franz Marc

Die Brucke

“All important things in art have always originated from the deepest feeling about the mystery of Being.” ~ Emil Nolde

"With faith in progress and in a new generation of creators and spectators we call together all youth. As youth, we carry the future and want to create for ourselves freedom of life and of movement against the long-established older forces. Everyone who reproduces that which drives him to creation with directness and authenticity belongs to us." ~ Ernst Ludwig Kirchner

“Dada is like your hopes:

nothing like your paradise:

nothing like your idols: nothing like your heroes: nothing like your artist:

nothing like your religions:

nothing.”

~ Francis Picabia

 

“Unless a picture shocks it is nothing.” 

~ Marcel Duchamp

 

“Since the tubes of paint used by the artist are manufactured and ready made products we must conclude that all the paintings in the world are 'readymades aided' and also works of assemblage. “

~ Marcel Duchamp

 

“A man who cannot visualize a horse galloping on a tomato is an idiot.” 

~ Andre Breton 

 

“One can understand why Surrealism was not afraid to make for itself a tenet of total revolt, complete insubordination, of sabotage according to rule, and why it still expects nothing save from violence.” 

~ Andre Breton

 

“The mind which plunges into Surrealism, relives with burning excitement the best part of childhood.” 

~ Andre Breton

 

“The more ignoble I find life, the more strongly I react by contradiction, in humour and in an outburst of liberty and expansion.” 

~ Joan Miro

 

“Surrealism is destructive, but it destroys only what it considers to be shackles limiting our vision.” 

~ Salvador Dali