Figurative Art Quotes

Portraiture is something that we're all drawn to. I think primarily other forms - we prefer, by and large, to look at human beings than a bowl of fruit.

If I had gone to art college and everybody was being a conceptual artist, I probably would have wanted to be a portrait or landscape painter.

The reason I don't like realist, photorealist, neorealist, or whatever, is that I am as interested in the artificial as I am in the real.

Everything I paint is a portrait, whatever the subject.

I am not comparing myself to great artists, but when you see conceptual artists at work, on some level it's reassuring to know they can paint figuratively. Likewise, when you listen to the '50s jazz people who do these vast solos, you buy into it more if they open by playing a tune.

My figures come and go, suggested by fortune or misfortune. I try to fix them divested of their apparent accidental quality.

I came down successfully through Picasso and Braque, down through Pollock, I guess, but I began to stop at Franz Kline and the Abstractionists. I like their design, brilliant design, marvelous color layers. But I don't find any human content there. I'm from an old school, and painting has to have human content for me.

I carry out my work thus: I never use models or nature for the figure, drapery or anything else.

I liked sculpting better than painting. You have more freedom in sculpting.

Painting will have to deal more fully and less obliquely with life and nature's phenomena before it can again become great.

I had no intentions of going into sculpture but found that sculpture was just an extension of drawing.

I only understand realism.

In the visual arts, particularly painting, I distrust all those abstractions, those artificial constructions. I have a very simple way of judging them: if I can do them, they are not art.

I often told the fanatics of realism that there is no such thing as realism in art: it only exists in the mind of the observer. Art is a symbol, a thing conjuring up reality in our mental image. That is why I don't see any contradiction between abstract and figurative art either.

I like '50s and '60s American art. I have 85 or 90 Warhols.

Painters and poets are obliged to exaggerate the proportions of their figures in order to give true perspective.

I had a natural feeling for sculpture, and the nudes are my sculpture.

I paint landscapes, figuratives. I painted all my life. In fact, I started as a commercial artist.

When I look at a body it gives me choice of what to put in a painting, what will suit me and what won't.

To put down an ideogram of a table so that people will recognize it as a table is not the work of a painter, but to sense it for a moment as a magic carpet with a leg hanging down at each corner is the beginning of a painter's imagination.

No painting can exist without the tension of what it figures and what it concretely consists of. The pleasure of what it could mean and the pain of what it's not.

The painter is not an intellectual if, when he has painted a nude woman, he gives us the idea that she is just about to put her clothes back on.

In a portrait, you have room to have a point of view. The image may not be literally what's going on, but it's representative.

Painting is the representation of visible forms. The essence of realism is its negation of the ideal.

O painter skilled in anatomy, beware lest the undue prominence of the bones, sinews and muscles cause you to become a wooden painter from the desire to make your nude figures reveal all.