40 quotes
Obey God by living spontaneously.
Its purpose is moral, that is, the evaluation of experience; in the deepest sense, the development of taste.
Some Notes on Caravaggio (1956)
No real painter ever wants be known through any other medium than his painting.
The Artist Speaks (1951)
To know what it is to look at things, life as a prayer, a mass, a celebration.
Life is more important than art — quantity is only important in that the amount of activity is greater not the number of works.
Good painting is not produced by any unintelligent following of inspiration or temperament.
The Artist Speaks (1951)
I am too romantic to accept the dishonesty inherent in such a role, or perhaps it is my religious education.
Painting is created from within and we must begin from within if we are to understand it.
Italian Report (1955)
It may be that it is the odd, the personal, the curious, the simply honest, that at this moment, when everyone looks to the extreme and flamboyant, constitutes the most interesting manifestation of the spirit of art.
Not to paint is the highest ambition of the painter but God who gives the gift requires that it be honoured. It is in the gesture that it lives. There is no escape.
New knowledge is only useful in so far as it opens up new vistas for the imagination, and no more so than the old forms which the artist must understand only in order to reject.
Nano Reid (1950)
They verge on the realm of the confession- hovering on that vital line between the simply revelatory and consequently vulgar, and the honest statement that is moral and consequently dignified.
Some Notes on Caravaggio (1956)
One cannot argue or explain in paint.
The Artist Speaks (1951)
I think that I probably have a real talent for painting trees if I developed it assiduously. I want to give them great density and depth pile heaps of detail into them and yet keep the sense of presence which is the whole point.
What trace of the creature subsists in the work. It is a way of staying alone, passing the time subjected to the object — silent, still. Walk with humility in the landscape. To be some natural thing — an ancient tree — no thinking — not to think is central to the activity.
The only indication of an individual vision is an individual style: "What I seek above all in a picture is a man and not a picture" – Zola
The Artist Speaks (1951)
For even the painter himself cannot be fully aware of the way in which the picture gets made: there is a wide area of the unpredictable in the act of pushing paint about in the definition of an image.
X magazine (1959)
His work is full of the signs of those two cardinal sins from which (as Kafka pointed out) all the others spring: impatience and laziness. The work of every artist is conditioned by the way in which he resists or yields to these temptations.
Some Notes on Caravaggio (1956)
Perhaps this is the great weakness of all criticism, that it tends to take facts derived from the examination of unimportant works and applies them in making a judgement about a man whose whole importance rests in the successful work, where these facts do not exist.
Some Notes on Caravaggio (1956)
The interesting thing is what happens in the specific picture: its precision in terms of the sensations it produces — the illusion it creates and the effect of this illusion on the psychology opposed to it.
X magazine (1959)