Maria Lassnig Quotes

Painting is the passage from the chaos of the emotions to the order of the possible.

Every artist is supposed to get emotional. You're painting pictures of emotions.

Painting is a nail to which I fasten my ideas.

There was a whole language that I could never make function for myself in relationship to painting and that was attitudes like tortured, struggle, pain.

When making a film, if I feel nothing in my body, I can't work. I have to touch. I have to feel. I never stop touching.

Art is not about thinking something up. It is the opposite - getting something down.

By painting colors and lines and forms seen in quickened mood I was seeking to make this mood vibrate as a phonograph does. This was the origin of the paintings in The Frieze of Life.

I draw what I feel, which is no more than doing my job.

For a long time, I was brilliantly achieving drawings that were inert, suffocating and dark. If ever you need illustrations that are inert, suffocating and dark, I know how to do them.

I don't see myself as a photographer. I still see the photographs and collages as a resource for the painting.

I think that there is not really a difference between a 'Peanuts' and a beautiful Renaissance painting. There is something very romantic in the 'Peanuts' - it's at the same level of a novel or a Jane Austen story or a beautiful embroidered rose fabric. It is a piece of romanticism.

I think about art a lot only in two contexts. One is narrative... The other thing that I'm interested in, which is tangential, but not unrelated... All art to me is about problem solving.

Early on I was very involved with the notion of the painting as an object and tended to attack that idea from different directions.

Art is mind and heart and touch as much and more than it is mere instrument, technique - without which however it cannot exist at all.

When I see people making 'abstract' painting, I think it's just a dialogue and a dialogue isn't enough. That is to say, there is you painting and this canvas. I think there has to be a third thing; it has to be a trialogue.

A distinction is made between artists who work directly from nature and those who work purely from imagination. Neither if these methods should be preferred to the exclusion of the other. Often both are used in turn by the same man.

I am unable to make any distinction between the feeling I get from life and the way I translate that feeling into painting.

You know, it's just like being a peddler. You want two breasts? Well, here you are -- two breasts. We must see to it that the man looking at the picture has at hand everything he needs to paint a nude. If you really give him everything he needs -- and the best -- he'll put everything where it belongs, with his own eyes. Each person will make for himself the kind of nude he wants, with the nude that I will have made for him.

I wanted to be a painter and an artist. And it's interesting that in some of my later musical works, I refer so often and associate myself with works of art.

I'm a painter, that's where I started out, at four years old, that was my first love as far as expression. So, I'm not a painter in the sense of, "Please come see my paintings" but, I do understand the value of not looking over the artist's shoulder while the work is in progress.

In the end, the gesture of painting becomes almost meditative, like a ritual.

On occasion I have drawn as a release from painting. The economy in using paper, pencil, charcoal and crayon can help towards a greater gamble and higher rewards. I also find that drawing can generate ideas more rapidly than painting.

I seldom have my stuff up unless I'm testing it. If I'm worrying about a painting, I put it up and see if I detest it quickly or slowly. Otherwise I have things by other artists.

I looked at Rembrandt and Superman, Matisse and Bugs Bunny, and began to make my own pictures.

Whoever wants to know something about me - as an artist which alone is significant - they should look attentively at my pictures and there seek to recognise what I am and what I want.