I think any artist reaches a point at which their motor skills have developed. Once their brain/hand coordination’s gotten to a certain level, they finally know how to do their own paintings. And it’s a terrible moment. A terrible, terrible thing. Before that, it’s all adventure. I’m gonna crash and burn or I’m gonna make it happen. Suddenly, you can make it happen, and that’s scary. It’s really the worst position, I think, for an artist to be in, and you have to find a way around it. Years ago, Joe Masheck and I were talking about Renoir’s Society of Irregularists, the fight against what Renoir called false perfection. He said something like, “I’m going to start painting with my left hand and mess it up on purpose.” And fifteen, twenty years ago, Joe and I were saying, “This is really lame, what a rotten idea.” Now I find myself getting older, and I think: Oh, my God, now I know why he was saying this. He was asking: How do you keep up the energy that you had when you were on a tightrope? How do you make a new tightrope for yourself?
Thomas Nozkowski
Where do you put a form? It will move all around, bellow out and shrink, and sometimes it winds up where it was in the first place. But at the end, it feels different, and it had to make the voyage. I am a moralist and cannot accept what has not been paid for, or a form that has not been lived through.
Philip Guston
The only knowledge, wit or wisdom I have for now is that my paintings come from silence and a world of abandonment. In another world there is this wrestling and restless engagement with things such as aesthetics and truth in which I can sometimes aggressively articulate my experiences and carve them in stone as though unbreakable and, at the next turn, smash these tablets of truth with little regard for what, yesterday, was the law of belief. In this world of silence, no truth exists; there is the abandonment of power that truth manifestly becomes in that other world of dogma, ideology and aesthetic certainty. The silence becomes the painting, the painting comes from silence. It is the moment when painting is no longer an act of doing or making but of receiving. There is no ego shape here, no facilitative reply to aesthetic notions, whether historical or contemporary, there is only that desperate faith of the abandoned...and there is the discovery and rediscovery of 'Art' which is exhilarating.
Patrick Graham
Living in New York City I sometimes think, sure, it would be beautiful to be out in the countryside and paint nature. I'd love to go out and sit down in front of a landscape with a lake and paint the reflections and birds and all kinds of wildlife. And start describing each living thing and paint it as I see it. And then I said, well I'm in a landscape already. The landscape I live in is the landscape of ripped drawings, of paint all over the place, of pencil sketches and drawings that have been compiled, images that have been thought about and turned and twisted. And suddenly I realize that I am in the landscape, and this is my landscape, and there's no point in trying to run away. I may as well just make art of it.
George Condo
One can, in fact, abandon oneself (not however without some second thoughts) to the call of that which is seen and keenly felt. The real is the springboard; it gives the impetus to everything that will ensue. There is nothing to do but let yourself go.
Jean Fautrier
It is the bareness of drawing that I like. The act of drawing is what locates, suggests, discovers. At times it seems enough to draw, without the distractions of colour and mass. Yet it is an old ambition to make drawing and painting one. Usually I draw in relation to my painting, what I am working on at the time. On a lucky day a surprising balance of forms and spaces will appear and I feel the drawing making itself, the image taking hold. This in turn moves me towards painting - anxious to get to the same place, with the actuality of paint and light.
Philip Guston
In front of a drawing made a long time ago, one can still come back to the moment it was made by looking at it again.
Yves Berger
Man gets tired of himself. Man is obsessed with himself. I would like some day to capture a moment of life in its full violence, its full beauty. That would be the ultimate painting.
Francis Bacon
My line is childlike but not childish. It is very difficult to fake: To get that quality you need to project yourself into the child's line. It has to be felt.
Cy Twombly
I never lose the consciousness of time: to me the present is never here: it is always last year or next week.
from The End of the Affair, by Graham Greene
