Ben Schnetzer Quotes

The studio is a place where I can experiment before I'm prepared for an idea to become a body of work, or a new way of working, or a way of working that can sustain me over a period of time.

It's easier and sociabler to talk technique than it is to make art.

An amateur may not be an artist, though an artist should be an amateur.

If you're going to be an artist, all life is your subject. And all your experience is part of your art. A youngster told me recently that he was going to give himself a year to see if he has talent. A year! It takes a lifetime to see if you have it. Painting is total engagement.

Painting is a nail to which I fasten my ideas.

The studio is a laboratory, not a factory. An exhibition is the result of your experiments, but the process is never-ending. So an exhibition is not a conclusion.

I enjoyed art in school. I've always done little drawings and stuff like that. I don't really know what I'm doing with the painting, but I experiment.

I stick the collages on the wall and, if I still like them after a month or two, I make a painting.

I had tried painting, mostly to give myself a greater appreciation of the craft and to inform how I looked at paintings. That led to collaging some of the work I had done on paper, and I found myself mixing in found pieces as well.

I think if you're a creative person, then you're always kinda looking to move things along - 'Where else can I go? Where can I take this?' From painters to photographers - anything creative in the arts - if you're a true artist, I think you'll always look to do something else. 'Where else can I go with it?' Do you know what I mean?

I feel mushy these days when I think about art and artists and the work that lies ahead for us. There's good work to be done and there's joy to be found in it, I think.

The moment we live in is a great time to make art. We have different technologies to play with, and we're left with the opportunity to focus on our work.

You're confusing product with process. Most people, when they criticize, whether they like it or hate it, they're talking about product. That's not art, that's the result of art. Art, to whatever degree we can get a handle on (I'm not sure that we really can) is a process. It begins in the heart and the mind with the eyes and hands.

If a work of art is to explore new environments, it is not to be regarded as a blueprint but rather as a form of action-painting.

Writing is a subtle art that is reached mostly by self-discovery and experimentation.

We have our brush and colors - paint Paradise and in we go.

Art keeps one young, I think, because it keeps one perpetually a beginner, perpetually a child.

Experiment is actually doing the art. That's the experiment and then you get to experience the experiment.

When I paint, I never think of selling. People simply fail to understand that we paint in order to experiment and to develop ourselves as we strive for greater heights.

It took me twenty years to discover painting: twenty years looking at nature, and above all, going to the Louvre.

I went to college as a theater major. But after about three weeks of that, I changed to the school of fine arts as a painter.

I'm a painter, that's where I started out, at four years old, that was my first love as far as expression. So, I'm not a painter in the sense of, "Please come see my paintings" but, I do understand the value of not looking over the artist's shoulder while the work is in progress.

I'm interested in art, and I think about the process of making art. It's part of my personality, my experience of the world, so it ends up in the movies. It's where my head is.

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.

Painting is the passage from the chaos of the emotions to the order of the possible.