Robert Wilson Quotes

You know, for a long time I have been of the opinion that artists don't necessarily know what they're doing. You don't necessarily know what kind of universal concept you're tapping into.

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

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

An artist who theorizes about his work is no longer artist but critic.

We are probably the only artists in the world who have a 2,000-page book on a work of art that doesn't exist. But in this way, these projects reveal their identity through this whole process. When I'm starting, I only have the slightest idea of how the work of art will exist.

Art doesn't transform. It just plain forms.

To be an artist, you need to play inside your work.

The use of the term art medium is, to say the least, misleading, for it is the artist that creates a work of art not the medium. It is the artist in photography that gives form to content by a distillation of ideas, thought, experience, insight and understanding.

Making art is different for everyone.

Art is that which comes to a man, and stands between himself and an implacable witness: the work.

I'm a pointillist, just working my tiny little piece of the canvas. I'm not so good at perspective.

Art is always a search for understanding, and the different levels and frequencies of that search feel completely comfortable and natural to me.

If you're not observing the world around you, in some sense you're not really an artist because then that means you're just replicating other people's stuff, or, I don't even know what you're doing.

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

Every picture has its own demands, and every picture stimulates something within you to tell it a certain way. I don't know what that is; I don't think too much about that.

I always feel like the art's there and I just see it, so it's not really a lot of work.

An artist is a dreamer consenting to dream of the actual world.

I think there are a lot of pictures to make. I sometimes question whether I'm even an artist or just a painter. To me, the making of the pictures is the most important thing.

I think most paintings are a record of the decisions that the artist made. I just perhaps make them a little clearer than some people have.

Asking an artist to talk about his work is like asking a plant to discuss horticulture.

If I'm astonished by what I've done, then I know I've been somewhere in the making of it but not during the making of it. Only after the fact. If I'm not astonished, then I've failed in the making of it.

That's what art is. You don't make up stories. You live your life.

So is fighting incompleteness the source of artistic neurosis? I doubt it. At most, this would apply to artists who deal with particular kinds of problems. I don't think we should think of Haydn or Mozart or Dickens or George Eliot in these terms.

I think about sculpture all the time. I work at it for ten to twelve hours a day. I even dream about it. If as a result I was only to produce something that everyone immediately understood I would't have been thinking very profoundly.

As an artist, you have the job of working out whatever is given you to work out.