• Art is not the application of a canon of beauty but what the instinct and the brain can conceive beyond any canon. When we love a woman we don't start measuring her limbs.

• Every act of creation is first an act of destruction.

• Everything you can imagine is real.

• Give me a museum and I'll fill it.

• He can who thinks he can, and he can't who thinks he can't. This is an inexorable, indisputable law.

• I am always doing that which I cannot do, in order that I may learn how to do it.

• I begin with an idea and then it becomes something else.

• I do not seek. I find.

• Action is the foundational key to all success.

• Ah, good taste! What a dreadful thing! Taste is the enemy of creativeness.

• An idea is a point of departure and no more. As soon as you elaborate it, it becomes transformed by thought.

• Art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life.

• Colors, like features, follow the changes of the emotions.

• Disciples be damned. It's not interesting. It's only the masters that matter. Those who create.

• Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up.

• God is really only another artist. He invented the giraffe, the elephantand the cat. He has no real style, He just goes on trying other things.

• I don't believe in accidents. There are only encounters in history. There are no accidents.

• I paint objects as I think them, not as I see them.

• It is your work in life that is the ultimate seduction.

• It takes a long time to become young.

• Museums are just a lot of lies, and the people who make art their business are mostly imposters. We have infected the pictures in museums with all our stupidities, all our mistakes, all our poverty of spirit. We have turned them into petty and ridiculous things.

• My mother said to me, "If you are a soldier, you will become a general. If you are a monk, you will become the Pope." Instead, I was a painter, and became Picasso.

• Never permit a dichotomy to rule your life, a dichotomy in which you hate what you do so you can have pleasure in your spare time. Look for a situation in which your work will give you as much happiness as your spare time.

• Often while reading a book one feels that the author would have preferred to paint rather than write; one can sense the pleasure he derives from describing a landscape or a person, as if he were painting what he is saying, because deep in his heart he would have preferred to use brushes and colors.

• One does a whole painting for one peach and people think just the opposite - that particular peach is but a detail.

• One must act in painting as in life, directly.

• Only put off until tomorrow what you are willing to die having left undone.

• Others have seen what is and asked why. I have seen what could be and asked why not.

• Our goals can only be reached through a vehicle of a plan, in which we must fervently believe, and upon which we must vigorously act. There is no other route to success.

• Painting is just another way of keeping a diary.

• Some painters transform the sun into a yellow spot, others transform a yellow spot into the sun.

• The artist is a receptacle for the emotions that come from all over the place: from the sky, from the earth, from a scrap of paper, from a passing shape, from a spider's web.

• The chief enemy of creativity is "good" sense.

• The hidden harmony is better than the obvious.

• The older you get the stronger the wind gets - and it's always in your face.

• To draw you must close your eyes and sing.

• To finish a work? To finish a picture? What nonsense! To finish it means to be through with it, to kill it, to rid it of its soul, to give it its final blow the coup de grace for the painter as well as for the picture.

• We all know that art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize the truth.

• What is a face, really? Its own photo? Its make-up? Or is it a face as painted by such or such painter? That which is in front? Inside? Behind? And the rest? Doesn't everyone look at himself in his own particular way? Deformations simply do not exist.

• What might be taken for a precocious genius is the genius of childhood. When the child grows up, it disappears without a trace. It may happen that this boy will become a real painter some day, or even a great painter. But then he will have to begin everything again, from zero.

• Youth has no age.

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www.jacksonpollock.org

Jackson Pollock   1912-1956

• Abstract painting is abstract. It confronts you.

• Abstract painting is abstract. It confronts you. There was a reviewer a while back who wrote that my pictures didn't have any beginning or any end. He didn't mean it as a compliment, but it was.

• On the floor I am more at ease. I feel nearer, more part of the painting, since this way I can walk around it, work from the four sides and literally be in the painting.

• Painting is self-discovery. Every good artist paints what he is.

• The modern artist is working with space and time, and expressing his feelings rather than illustrating.

• The modern artist... is working and expressing an inner world - in other words - expressing the energy, the motion, and other inner forces.

• The painting has a life of its own. I try to let it come through.

• Bums are the well-to-do of this day. They didn't have as far to fall.

• He drove his kind of realism at me so hard I bounced right into nonobjective painting.

• I continue to get further away from the usual painter's tools such as easel, palette, brushes, etc.

• I don't work from drawings. I don't make sketches and drawings and color sketches into a final painting.

• I hardly ever stretch the canvas before painting.

• I have no fear of making changes, destroying the image, etc., because the painting has a life of its own.

• I prefer sticks, trowels, knives and dripping fluid paint or a heavy impasto with sand, broken glass or other foreign matter added.

• I'm very representational some of the time, and a little all of the time. But when you're painting out of your unconscious, figures are bound to emerge.

• It doesn't make much difference how the paint is put on as long as something has been said. Technique is just a means of arriving at a statement.

• It is only when I lose contact with the painting that the result is a mess. Otherwise there is pure harmony, an easy give and take, and the painting comes out well.

• My painting does not come from the easel.

• My paintings do not have a center, but depend on the same amount of interest throughout.

• New needs need new techniques. And the modern artists have found new ways and new means of making their statements... the modern painter cannot express this age, the airplane, the atom bomb, the radio, in the old forms of the Renaissance or of any other past culture.

• The strangeness will wear off and I think we will discover the deeper meanings in modern art.

• Today painters do not have to go to a subject matter outside of themselves. Most modern painters work from a different source. They work from within.

• When I am painting I have a general notion as to what I am about. I can control the flow of paint: there is no accident.

• When I say artist I mean the man who is building things - creating molding the earth - whether it be the plains of the west - or the iron ore of Penn. It's all a big game of construction - some with a brush - some with a shovel - some choose a pen.

• When I'm painting, I'm not aware of what I'm doing. It's only after a get acquainted period that I see what I've been about. I've no fears about making changes for the painting has a life of its own.

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• I don't paint things. I only paint the difference between things.

• I have been no more than a medium, as it were.

• I have always tried to hide my efforts and wished my works to have the light joyousness of springtime which never lets anyone suspect the labors it has cost me.

• There are always flowers for those who want to see them.

• Time extracts various values from a painter's work. When these values are exhausted the pictures are forgotten, and the more a picture has to give, the greater it is.

• What I dream of is an art of balance, of purity and serenity devoid of troubling or depressing subject matter - a soothing, calming influence on the mind, rather like a good armchair which provides relaxation from physical fatigue.

• You study, you learn, but you guard the original naivete. It has to be within you, as desire for drink is within the drunkard or love is within the lover.

• Seek the strongest color effect possible.. the content is of no importance.

• Creativity takes courage.

• A young painter who cannot liberate himself from the influence of past generations is digging his own grave.

• An artist must possess Nature. He must identify himself with her rhythm, by efforts that will prepare the mastery which will later enable him to express himself in his own language.

• Drawing is like making an expressive gesture with the advantage of permanence.

• Truth and reality in art do not arise until you no longer understand what you are doing and are capable of but nevertheless sense a power that grows in proportion to your resistance.

• I do not literally paint that table, but the emotion it produces upon me.

• I am unable to make any distinction between the feeling I get from life and the way I translate that feeling into painting.

• I have always sought to be understood and, while I was taken to task by critics or colleagues, I thought they were right, assuming I had not been clear enough to be understood. This assumption allowed me to work my whole life without hatred and even without bitterness toward criticism, regardless of its source. I counted solely on the clarity of expression of my work to gain my ends. Hatred, rancor, and the spirit of vengeance are useless baggage to the artist. His road is difficult enough for him to cleanse his soul of everything which could make it more so.

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Paul Gauguin 1848 - 1903

• Art is either plagiarism or revolution.

• Art requires philosophy, just as philosophy requires art. Otherwise, what would become of beauty?

• Civilization is what makes you sick.

• I shut my eyes in order to see.

• It is the eye of ignorance that assigns a fixed and unchangeable color to every object; beware of this stumbling block.

• Life has no meaning unless one lives it with a will, at least to the limit of one's will. Virtue, good, evil are nothing but words, unless one takes them apart in order to build something with them; they do not win their true meaning until one knows how to apply them.

• Life is hardly more than a fraction of a second. Such a little time to prepare oneself for eternity!

• Stressing output is the key to improving productivity, while looking to increase activity can result in just the opposite.

• The history of modern art is also the history of the progressive loss of art's audience. Art has increasingly become the concern of the artist and the bafflement of the public.

• There is always a heavy demand for fresh mediocrity. In every generation the least cultivated taste has the largest appetite.

• We never really know what stupidity is until we have experimented on ourselves.

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Paul Klee 1879-1940

• A single day is enough to make us a little larger or, another time, a little smaller.

• Art does not reproduce the visible; rather, it makes visible.

• Beauty is as relative as light and dark. Thus, there exists no beautiful woman, none at all, because you are never certain that a still far more beautiful woman will not appear and completely shame the supposed beauty of the first.

• Children also have artistic ability, and there is wisdom in there having it! The more helpless they are, the more instructive are the examples they furnish us; and they must be preserved free of corruption from an early age.

• Color possesses me. I don't have to pursue it. It will possess me always, I know it. That is the meaning of this happy hour: Color and I are one. I am a painter.

• Democracy with its semi-civilization sincerely cherishes junk. The artist's power should be spiritual. But the power of the majority is material. When these worlds meet occasionally, it is pure coincidence.

• Everything vanishes around me, and works are born as if out of the void. Ripe, graphic fruits fall off. My hand has become the obedient instrument of a remote will.

• He has found his style, when he cannot do otherwise.

• In the final analysis, a drawing simply is no longer a drawing, no matter how self-sufficient its execution may be. It is a symbol, and the more profoundly the imaginary lines of projection meet higher dimensions, the better.

• Nature is garrulous to the point of confusion, let the artist be truly taciturn.

• One does not lash hat lies at a distance. The foibles that we ridicule must at least be a little bit our own. Only then will the work be a part of our own flesh. The garden must be weeded.

• One eye sees, the other feels.

• Satire must not be a kind of superfluous ill will, but ill will from a higher point of view. Ridiculous man, divine God. Or else, hatred against the bogged-down vileness of average man as against the possible heights that humanity might attain.

• The art of mastering life is the prerequisite for all further forms of expression, whether they are paintings, sculptures, tragedies, or musical compositions.

• To emphasize only the beautiful seems to me to be like a mathematical system that only concerns itself with positive numbers.

• When looking at any significant work of art, remember that a more significant one probably has had to be sacrificed.

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Camille Pissarro 1830-1903

•  All the sorrows, all the bitternesses, all the sadnesses, I forget them and ignore them in the joy of working.

• Blessed are they who see beautiful things in humble places where other people see nothing.

• Cover the canvas at the first go, then work at it until you see nothing more to add.

• Everything is beautiful, all that matters is to be able to interpret.

• God takes care of imbeciles, little children and artists.

• I began to understand my sensations, to know what I wanted, at around the age of forty - but only vaguely.

• I regard it as a waste of time to think only of selling: one forgets one's art and exaggerates one's value.

• I remember that, although I was full of fervour, I didn't have the slightest inkling, even at forty, of the deeper side to the movement we were pursuing by instinct. It was in the air!

• I sometimes have a horrible fear of turning up a canvas of mine. I'm always afraid of finding a monster in place of the precious jewels I thought I had put there!

• It is absurd to look for perfection.

• It is only by drawing often, drawing everything, drawing incessantly, that one fine day you discover to your surprise that you have rendered something in its true character.

• It is the brushwork of the right value and color which should produce the drawing.

• Observe that it is a great error to believe that all mediums of art are not closely tied to their time.

• Paint the essential character of things.

• When you do a thing with your whole soul and everything that is noble within you, you always find your counterpart.

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Georgia O'Keeffe 1887-1986

• To create one's own world in any of the arts takes courage.

• I decided that if I could paint that flower in a huge scale, you could not ignore its beauty.

• I feel there is something unexplored about woman that only a woman can explore.

• I found I could say things with color and shapes that I couldn't say any other way - things I had no words for.

• It was in the 1920s, when nobody had time to reflect, that I saw a still-life painting with a flower that was perfectly exquisite, but so small you really could not appreciate it.

• Nobody sees a flower really; it is so small. We haven't time, and to see takes time - like to have a friend takes time.

• Singing has always seemed to me the most perfect means of expression. It is so spontaneous. And after singing, I think the violin. Since I cannot sing, I paint.

• Sun-bleached bones were most wonderful against the blue - that blue that will always be there as it is now after all man's destruction is finished.

• When you take a flower in your hand and really look at it, it's your world for the moment. I want to give that world to someone else. Most people in the city rush around so, they have no time to look at a flower. I want them to see it whether they want to or not.

• You get whatever accomplishment you are willing to declare.
   

www.okeeffemuseum.org

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Robert Delaunay

• I am very much afraid of definitions, and yet one is almost forced to make them. One must take care, too, not to be inhibited by them.

• Art in Nature is rhythmic and has a horror of constraint.

• But what is of great importance to me is observation of the movement of colors.

• Clarity will be color, proportion; these proportions are composed of diverse elements, simultaneously involved in an action.

• Discerning the quality of rhythms is a movement, and the essential quality of painting is representation the movement of vision which functions in objectivizing itself toward reality. That is the essential of art, and its greatest profoundness.

• First of all, I always see the sun! The way I want to identify myself and others is with halos here and there halos, movements of color. And that, I believe, is rhythm.

• For me, every man distinguishes himself by his essence his personal movement, as opposed to that which is universal.

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

• In this movement of colors I find the essence, which does not arise from a system, or an a priori theory.

• Light comes to us by the sensibility. Without visual sensibility there is no light, no movement.

• Light in Nature creates the movement of colors.

• Seeing is in itself a movement.

• The auditory perception is not sufficient for our knowledge of the world; it does not have vastness.

• The eye is the most refined of our senses, the one which communicates most directly with our mind, our consciousness.

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Frida Kahlo 1907-1954 Mexican

I never paint dreams or nightmares. I paint my own reality.

I paint self-portraits because I am so often alone, because I am the person I know best.

My painting carries with it the message of pain.

Painting completed my life.


The only thing I know is that I paint because I need to, and I paint whatever passes through my head without any other consideration.

 

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• The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance. Aristotle
• The artist is nothing without the gift, but the gift is nothing without work.
  Emile Zola
• Art is not a thing; it is a way. Elbert Hubbard
• Everyone has talent. What is rare is the courage to follow that talent to the dark place where it lead. Erica Jong
• Art is the desire of a man to express himself, to record the reactions of his personality to the world he lives in. Amy Lowell
• I am an artist... I am here to live out loud. Emile Zola
• True art is characterized by an irresistible urge in the creative artist.
  Albert Einstein
• Are you really sure that a floor can't also be a ceiling?M. C. Escher
• I don't use drugs, my dreams are frightening enough.M. C. Escher
• You don't take a photograph, you make it. Ansel Adams
• Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep. Scott Adams
   

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Dott.ssa Paola Bonavolontà          Studio: Roma Eur      cell.+39-3932206505