Julie Mehretu Quotes

I think I'm painting a picture of two women but it may turn out to be a landscape.

Fiction, maybe art in general, is a tentative, uncertain enterprise; it's not science, it's an exploration, but you never find much in the way of answers.

I did best when I had least truth for my subjects.

Mystery is the basic element of all works of art.

Every man has a different idea of what's beautiful, and it's best to take the gesture, the shadow of the branch, and let the mind create the tree.

An image is a stop the mind makes between uncertainties.

Music, first of all, is completely about abstraction, which is exactly what architecture is not. In a way, it has been incredibly constructive to know what true abstraction is. So you don't fall into the trap of thinking that what you do is abstract.

Imagine if Beethoven had a tape recorder. Then you'd know exactly what he meant. Maybe he meant 'Da da da da' instead of 'Boom boom boom boom!' Who knows?

Sometimes I see it and then paint it. Other times I paint it and then see it. Both are impure situations, and I prefer neither.

Life is not an exact science, it is an art.

What we don't understand we can make mean anything.

Art is about imagination. When you look at a picture from Salvador Dali, that's about imagination. When you look at Picasso, that's about imagination. Doing stuff from your heart.

If you judge everything by how photographically real it looks, then you're missing out on a lot of what art is about and what communication is. There are ambiguities in life, and that should be reflected in art, cinema, and storytelling, I think.

For me, music is pure abstraction.

For me it remains an open question whether [this work] pertains to the realm of mathematics or to that of art.

I guess the role of art is to make something that is ambiguous and complex.

Theory has nothing to do with a work of art. Pictures which are interpretable, and which contain a meaning, are bad pictures. A picture presents itself as the Unmanageable, the Illogical, the Meaningless. It demonstrates the endless multiplicity of aspects; it takes away our certainty, because it deprives a thing of its meaning and its name. It shows us the thing in all the manifold significance and infinite variety that preclude the emergence of any single meaning and view.

Art is a line around your thoughts.

Mystery is the essential element of every work of art.

Who will dare say he has defined art?

But of works of art little can be said.

Making art has first of all to do with honesty. My first lesson was to see objectively, to erase all meaning of the thing seen. Then only could the real meaning of it be understood and felt.

Pure drawing is an abstraction.

All art is an abstraction to some degree.

There is no adequate definition for creative writing, any more than it is possible to describe pain or flavor or color.