Agnes Martin Quotes

I love to create, and to me, the ultimate freedom of expression is a blank canvas or a block of clay to capture whatever emotions your imagination gives it.

My greatest joy comes from creativity: from feeling that I have been able to identify a certain aspect of human nature and crystallise a phenomenon in words.

Art flies around truth, but with the definite intention of not getting burnt. Its capacity lies in finding in the dark void a place where the beam of light can be intensely caught, without this having been perceptible before.

A great artist is a great man in a great child.

Artists need to express.

I start a picture and I finish it.

A drawing is simply a line going for a walk.

I love creating images, of course, because I'm an artist.

The job of the artist is always to deepen the mystery.

Some people would say my paintings show a future world and maybe they do, but I paint from reality. I put several things and ideas together, and perhaps, when I have finished, it could show the future.

I dream of painting and then I paint my dream.

I think that everything is part of creativity - the more you create, the more you have ideas, and the more you meet people.

Would that we could at once paint with the eyes! In the long way from the eye through the arm to the pencil, how much is lost!

What is art? Nature concentrated.

I try and make little stories. Whether it's with a pencil or with bits of records, it's really the same thing.

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.

Make good art.

To give a body and a perfect form to one's thought, this - and only this - is to be an artist.

For me, Picasso was the ultimate man. He taught me that photography is all about how you approach an image: what you do and what you don't do. He inspired me to go beyond what you think is in front of you.

Painting from nature is not copying the object; it is realizing one's sensations.

Great art picks up where nature ends.

The drawing is already partly there - it's in the paper. And the paper is talking before you do.

After I'd produced about two dozen pen and ink drawings, one evening I decided that they needed poems to accompany them. I still have no idea where that notion came from, but it took me about two hours to produce verses for these creatures.

I look out the window sometimes to seek the color of the shadows and the different greens in the trees, but when I get ready to paint I just close my eyes and imagine a scene.

Were I called on to define, very briefly, the term Art, I should call it 'the reproduction of what the Senses perceive in Nature through the veil of the soul.' The mere imitation, however accurate, of what is in Nature, entitles no man to the sacred name of 'Artist.'