Richard Diebenkorn Quotes

All paintings start out of a mood, out of a relationship with things or people, out of a complete visual impression. To call this expression abstract seems to me often to confuse the issue. Abstract means literally to draw from or separate. In this sense every artist is abstract . . . a realistic or non-objective approach makes no difference. The result is what counts.

Art begins . . . when someone interprets, when someone sees the world through his own eyes. Art happens when what is seen becomes mixed with the inside of the person who is seeing it.

Impressionism is the newspaper of the soul.

How do I define a work of art? It is not an asset in the stock-exchange sense, but a man's timid attempt to repeat the miracle that the simplest peasant girl is capable of at any time, that of magically producing life out of nothing.

Modern pictures banish depiction for interfering with the workings of paint.

Art is the imposing of a pattern on experience.

A work becomes a work of art when one re-evaluates the values of nature and adds one's own spirituality.

There are no forms in nature. Nature is a vast, chaotic collection of shapes. You as an artist create configurations out of chaos. You make a formal statement where there was none to begin with. All art is a combination of an external event and an internal event… I make a photograph to give you the equivalent of what I felt. Equivalent is still the best word.

Painting is the pattern of one's own nervous system being projected on canvas.

The true painter strives to paint what can only be seen through his world.

Art is revelation instead of information, expression instead of description, creation instead of imitation or repetition. Art is concerned with the HOW, not the WHAT; not with literal content, but with the performance of the factual content. The performance - how it is done - that is the content of art.

A bit of advice, don't copy nature too closely. Art is an abstraction; as you dream amid nature, extrapolate art from it, and concentrate on what you will create as a result.

I'd always wanted to know the difference between a mark that was art and one that wasn't.

I murmured to Picasso that I liked his portrait of Gertrude Stein. Yes, he said, everybody said that she does not look like it, but that does not make any difference, she will, he said.

Abstract art is only painting. And what's so dramatic about that? There is no abstract art. One must always begin with something. Afterwards one can remove all semblance of reality; there is no longer any danger as the idea of the object has left an indelible imprint.

Art is a selective re-creation of reality according to an artists metaphysical value judgments.

If you want to paint the inner life, you paint it from the exterior. From the exterior, you breathe the inner life into your painting.

A work of art is a world in itself reflecting senses and emotions of the artist's world.

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

Art is the desire of a man to express himself, to record the reactions of his personality to the world he lives in.

There is no abstract art. You must always start with something. Afterward you can remove all traces of reality.

I paint what I see, not what a camera would see.

The crucial discovery was made that, in order to become painting, the universe seen by the artist had to become a private one created by himself.

By painting colors and lines and forms seen in quickened mood I was seeking to make this mood vibrate as a phonograph does. This was the origin of the paintings in The Frieze of Life.

Great art is the outward expression of an inner life in the artist, and this inner life will result in his personal vision of the world.