Nigel Hamilton Quotes

It is not possible to overstate the influence of Paul Cezanne on twentieth-century art. He's the modern Giotto, someone who shattered one kind of picture-making and invented a new one that the world followed.

The paintings by Van Gough and Chagall had a big influence on me.

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.

Well, let's say we acknowledged the School of French Painting - the Paris School of painting as the leading force and vitality of the time. I think that was understood and felt and experienced.

Distortion came first from the fauves, who, in turn, were under the strong influence of primitive art.

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.

Experience was my only teacher; I knew little of the modern art movement. When I first saw the works of the Impressionists, van Gogh, van Dongen, and Fauves, I admired it. But I had to seek the true way alone.

I have many favorite artists... Van Gogh as one, but he didn't really sing a lot!

I find impressionists slightly annoying, really.

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.

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

Impressionism; it is the birth of Light in painting.

I was for years in the yellow period, you know.

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

I love art, painting, and drawing and studying art, like Rembrandt and Van Gogh.

Art is always an exaggeration in some sense; in color, in form, even in theme, etc... but it has always been this way. It is the same with the nature of some works by Giotto or Massacio, or the color of life as expressed by Van Gogh.

Well, I think there are artists who are more or less contemporary with Hopper who are more relevant.

I went to the Academy and studied with Stuck who was then a big man. But didn't interest me. I didn't know that before me there was Kandinsky and Klee who had also studied with Stuck. He had a good name at that time.

I was an art history major, but never specifically contemporary. I would say where I really stopped were the abstract expressionists in the New York school.

Yes, you know sometimes, we started out thinking out how strange our painting was next to normal painting, which was anything expressionist. You forget that this has been thirty five years now and people don't look at it as if it were some kind of oddity.

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

I thought it would be very nice to become Picasso or Rembrandt, or a van Gogh.

We shot that in all the real places where Van Gogh worked.

My first influence obviously was Picasso.