JOAN MIRO

The works must be conceived with fire in the soul but executed with clinical coolness.

My characters have undergone the same process of simplification as the colors. Now that they have been simplified, they appear more human and alive than if they had been represented in all their details.

Throughout the time in which I am working on a canvas I can feel how I am beginning to love it, with that love which is born of slow comprehension.

I try to apply colors like words that shape poems, like notes that shape music.

What I am looking for... is an immobile movement, something which would be the equivalent of what is called the eloquence of silence, or what St. John of the Cross, I think it was, described with the term 'mute music'.

I feel the need of attaining the maximum of intensity with the minimum of means. It is this which has led me to give my painting a character of even greater bareness.

For me an object is something living. This cigarette or this box of matches contains a secret life much more intense than that of certain human beings.

Little by little, I've reached the stage of using only a small number of forms and colors. It's not the first time that painting has been done with a very narrow range of colors. The frescoes of the tenth century are painted like this. For me, they are magnificent things.

The painting rises from the brushstrokes as a poem rises from the words. The meaning comes later.

The spectacle of the sky overwhelms me. Im overwhelmed when I see, in an immense sky, the crescent of the moon, or the sun. There, in my pictures, tiny forms in huge empty spaces. Empty spaces, empty horizons, empty plains - everything which is bare has always greatly impressed me.

What I am seeking... is a motionless movement, something equivalent to what is called the eloquence of silence.

I start from something considered dead and arrive at a world. And when I put a title on it, it becomes even more alive.

I think of my studio as a vegetable garden, where things follow their natural course. They grow, they ripen. You have to graft. You have to water.

I believe that to do anything in this world one needs a love for risk and adventure, and above all, to be able to do without what middle-class families call "future."

You can look at a picture for a week and never think of it again. You can also look at the picture for a second and think of it all your life.

I work like a gardener.

The picture should be fecund. It must bring a world to birth.

The more I work, the more I want to work.

For me, a picture should be like sparks. It must dazzle like the beauty of a woman or a poem. It must have radiance; it must be like those stones which Pyrenean shepherds use to light their pipes.

My way is to seize an image the moment it has formed in my mind, to trap it as a bird and to pin it at once to canvas. Afterward I start to tame it, to master it. I bring it under control and I develop it.

More important than a work of art itself is what it will sow. Art can die, a painting can disappear. What counts is the seed.

What I will no longer accept is the mediocre life of a modest little gentleman.

A modeled form is less striking than one which is not. Modeling prevents shock and limits movement to the visual depth. Without modeling or chiaroscuro depth is limitless: movement can stretch to infinity.

That which interests me above all else is the calligraphy of a tree or the tiles of a roof, and I mean leaf by leaf, branch by branch, blade by blade of grass.

Poetry and painting are done in the same way you make love; it's an exchange of blood, a total embrace - without caution, without any thought of protecting yourself.