Manuel Puig Quotes

I love many realists but very strongly resist the notion that realism presents a less stylized, more authentic version of the world.

Painting will have to deal more fully and less obliquely with life and nature's phenomena before it can again become great.

The reason I don't like realist, photorealist, neorealist, or whatever, is that I am as interested in the artificial as I am in the real.

In art there are two principal schools between which each aspirant has to choose--one distinguished by its close adherence to nature, and the other by its strenuous efforts to get above it.

Things like anatomy and drawing and design and color had pretty much been drop-kicked out of the curriculum in the '70s, when I was studying art, in favor of abstraction and minimalism.

He drove his kind of realism at me so hard I bounced right into nonobjective painting.

I carry out my work thus: I never use models or nature for the figure, drapery or anything else.

I love my early movies, but naturalism is an artist's early style. Now I want to deal with feelings, dreams, an acceptance of irrationality.

If Art relates itself to an Object, it becomes descriptive, divisionist, literary.

In the visual arts, particularly painting, I distrust all those abstractions, those artificial constructions. I have a very simple way of judging them: if I can do them, they are not art.

There is no abstract art. You must always start with something. Afterward you can remove all traces of reality.

Painter after painter, since the beginning of the century, has tended toward abstraction. First, the Impressionists simplified the landscape in terms of color, and then the Fauves simplified it again by adding distortion, which, for some reason, is a characteristic of our century.

I will always find even the worst paintings that attempt some kind of representation better than the best invented paintings.

I think sincerity was my sole aesthetic and realism my experimental technique.

I like the transience of Klimt paintings.

I don't know if I'm an impressionist or an expressionist. You can call me an American first... I've been labeled doing neimanism, so that's what it is, I guess.

I wanted to paint in a folk-artist-y way. My heroes were Van Gogh, Gauguin, Matisse, and Rembrandt. I think Picasso is about as a modern as I got. But I incorporated things that they rejected as well as movements that happened later.

Painting is the representation of visible forms. The essence of realism is its negation of the ideal.

If I could have any artist's work on my sitting room wall it would probably be by Van Gogh or Picasso.

The real sustains the same relation to the ideal that a stone does to a statue - or that paint does to a painting. Realism degrades and impoverishes.

I never use nature as a starting point. I never abstract from nature; I never consciously think of nature when I paint.

I have never subscribed to the Dirty Pallet school of painting.

I am not interested in representing reality. Actually, I am interested in representing reality, but that doesn't mean a naturalistic approach, which I think is kind of impossible.

The thrill of a photo-realist painter is if you get really close to the painting, it looks just like a photograph. Whereas in my case, if you get close to my paintings, they totally fall apart - so I'm about as far from a photo-realist as it gets.

If I had gone to art college and everybody was being a conceptual artist, I probably would have wanted to be a portrait or landscape painter.