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Quotes from Conversations with Samuel Beckett and Bram van Velde — Bram van Velde

1895–1981 Netherlands

← All quotes by Bram van Velde

78 quotes

I am well aware that a painting must inevitably be a bizarre, incomprehensible thing.

Conversations with Samuel Beckett and Bram van Velde (1970)

I have to try to see where seeing is no longer possible, where visibility is gone.

Conversations with Samuel Beckett and Bram van Velde (1965)

Painting lives only through the slide towards the unknown in oneself.

Conversations with Samuel Beckett and Bram van Velde (1970)

Through painting I try to get closer to nothingness, to the void.

Conversations with Samuel Beckett and Bram van Velde (1965)

The most difficult thing is not to want anything.

Conversations with Samuel Beckett and Bram van Velde (1965)

Each painting is linked to a fundamental drama.

Conversations with Samuel Beckett and Bram van Velde (1965)

You are in constant danger of being destroyed.

Conversations with Samuel Beckett and Bram van Velde (1965)

Each painting contains so much suffering.

Conversations with Samuel Beckett and Bram van Velde (1965)

Artists don’t live in the everyday world. That’s why people think they’re an odd bunch.

Conversations with Samuel Beckett and Bram van Velde (1965)

There’s always doubt. There’s nothing you can get hold of.

Conversations with Samuel Beckett and Bram van Velde (1965)

Painting is getting in touch with the truth. It's a matter of summoning up the vision I need.

Conversations with Samuel Beckett and Bram van Velde (1970)

Of course painting is ridiculous. But it’s the only way I've got to get closer to life.

Conversations with Samuel Beckett and Bram van Velde (1965)

There is only the present. A painting is an instant of time that has escaped oblivion.

Conversations with Samuel Beckett and Bram van Velde (1970)

The beauty other people create is not for the artists. Artists have to live alone.

Conversations with Samuel Beckett and Bram van Velde (1965)

You are in an area where knowledge fails. Where you have to advance in ignorance, not even knowing where you are going.

Conversations with Samuel Beckett and Bram van Velde (1970)

The greatest moment is when you realize that the painting you've just finished is nothing. When you manage to detach yourself from it.

Conversations with Samuel Beckett and Bram van Velde (1970)

There's a perpetual duel going on between the world of the spirit and the world of things. Although the one only has meaning in relation to the other.

Conversations with Samuel Beckett and Bram van Velde (1965)

I am in the void. Nothing to hang on to.

Conversations with Samuel Beckett and Bram van Velde (1965)

When I look back to a recent painting, I can hardly bear th suffering in it.

Conversations with Samuel Beckett and Bram van Velde (1965)

Artists who are the defenders of true life become phonies. That’s the perfidious thing about this world. Society turns anyone with a bit of life inside them into a medical case.

Conversations with Samuel Beckett and Bram van Velde (1965)

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Bram van Velde (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.