Gerhard Richter Quotes

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

In this movement of colors I find the essence, which does not arise from a system, or an a priori theory.

I let myself go. I thought little of the houses and trees, but applied colour stripes and spots to the canva... Within me sounded the memory of early evening in Moscow, before my eyes was the strong, colour-saturated scale of the Munich light and atmosphere, which thundered deeply in the shadows.

By the combination of lines and colors, under the pretext of some motif taken from nature, I create symphonies and harmonies that represent nothing absolutely real in the ordinary sense of the word but are intended to give rise to thoughts as music does.

No poem is intended for the reader, no picture for the beholder, no symphony for the listener.

Ideas alone can be works of art; they are in a chain of development that may eventually find some form. All ideas need not be made physical.

Poetry is a slipknot tightened around a time-beat of one thought, two thoughts, and a last interweaving thought there is not yet a number for.

I was trying. I was crawling. I was coming into myself. I was trying to in some ways get beyond - what is the word that I'm looking for? - metaphorical language in painting, and to create something that was more indexical. And what I mean by that is that when you go to the library there's an index card that refers to a book that's actual and real in the world. So that index relates to something real.

I wonder if the artist ever lives his life--he is so busy recreating it.

Music is the human treatment of sounds.

In a way, artists are shamans, facilitators who take what's there, channel it through themselves, then put it out there for people to appreciate.

The abstract music is just more interesting because it doesn't really have anything to say, but if it is good, it creates thoughts and feelings, and I enjoy that. For me, once the music creates those thoughts and feelings, I begin to write a song about it.

I've had a period of drawing on canvas in black - with some of my early images coming thru -, think the non-objectivists will find them disturbing - and the kids who think it simple to splash a 'Pollock' out.

Maybe I was a little jealous or envious of the abstract painters - but the truth was I thought what they were doing was boring.

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.

If you try to make interesting films, you're going to be disappointed most of the time. I choose just not to look at it that way.

For a painter as abstract as myself, the collages offer a way of incorporating bits of the everyday world into pictures.

I never find words right away. Poems for me always begin with images and rhythms, shapes, feelings, forms, dances in the back of my mind.

The artist secretes nostalgia around life.

Music is an experience, not a science.

I hang my work upside down to emphasize surface.

When people say, 'I don't get art' ... that means art is working.

Painting is another form of thinking.

A bit of advice, don't copy nature too closely. Art is an abstraction; as you dream amid nature, extrapolate art from it, and concentrate on what you will create as a result.

The subject may be of first importance to the artist when he starts a picture, but it should be of least importance in the finished product. The subject is of no aesthetic significance.