Keanu Reeves Quotes

When I began as an artist, I already did not like expressionism, or abstract expressionism, because abstract painting had already been done. I did not want to belong to any one group or the other, and I'm not one or the other.

I have to say, Alejandro Colucci is amazing. I had seen his work several times before I started making the connection between the art and the person making it, and when I heard that he was going to work on the cover for 'Seven Forges,' that connection was not yet cemented.

I like a lot of modern art. I like Chuck Close a lot. It doesn't necessarily directly influence the work I draw on the page.

I'll take anything and slap it on a canvas.

That was really the Fifties for me - that whole spirit of flicking the paint on the canvas.

Modernistic-Abstractionist-Art consists of 75% explanation and 25% God knows what!

I do not like to be a prophet. I like better to paint than to predict what the next painters will do. Though I have a feeling that consideration of order is very much in the air.

No one who looks at my paintings can see whether a painting is upside down or not anymore. I've made or developed so many image models that some people have given up trying to keep track of me. But others have only one or two ways of doing things and are successful with that.

But ‘art’ is not anything serious or exclusive: it is the smell of oil paint, Henri Murger’s Vie de Boheme, corduroy trousers, the operatic Italian model: but the poetry, above all, of linseed oil and turpentine.

Michelangelo is a constructor, and Rafael an artist who, great as he is, is always limited by the model. When he tries to be thoughtful he falls below the niveau of his great rival.

I'm a sponge, the more I absorb, the more I am able to articulate my vision, as artists do, like Picasso. I'm an artist in that light. I went from being an artist to an artiste.

In the end I'm in love with it [Western European easel painting]. And that's where a lot of the influence from the work comes from.

All paintings start out of a mood, out of a relationship with things or people, out of a complete visual impression. To call this expression abstract seems to me often to confuse the issue. Abstract means literally to draw from or separate. In this sense every artist is abstract . . . a realistic or non-objective approach makes no difference. The result is what counts.

I've never been a representational artist at all. Most artists have been representational. That's when you discover yourself.

I have lived among enough painters and around studios to have had all the theories - and how contradictory they are - rammed down my throat. A man has to have a gizzard like an ostrich to digest all the brass-tacks and wire nails of modern art theories.

I want to communicate. I do; every artist does. That's why you're an artist.

The only hope I had was when (in his youth)I saw one day a photograph of a sculpture by Wilhelm Lehmbruck, a German sculptor of expressionistic style. This was perhaps the only example, Lehmbruck, between my sixteenth to nineteenth years in which I saw a possibility for art to be principally of interest to innovate some things, instead of writing a very boring, naturalistic repetition of what is already done by nature.

I love art. It is uplifting.

If I was an artist, and I was in the studio, then whatever I was doing in the studio must be art.

The first thing I remember is Alexander Calder - our school took us on a field trip to go see the Calder mobiles, and that always stuck in my memory.

Abstract painting is abstract. It confronts you.

I have studied the art of the masters and the art of the moderns, avoiding any preconceived system and without prejudice. I have no more wanted to imitate the former than to copy the latter; nor have I thought of achieving the idle aim of art for art's sake.

It became like a symbolic thing, to be “an artist.” After Duchamp, I realized that being an artist is more about a lifestyle and attitude than producing some product.

I'm an artist that's attracted to a specific way of seeing and a way of being.

The moment of creative impulse is what an artist gives you. You look at a Pollock, and it can't give you the tools to do a painting like that yourself, but in doing the work, Pollock shares with you the moment of creative impulse that drove him to do that work.