Doug Aitken Quotes

I look at art as a container. You can't get inside it, so you have to ask all of these questions.

The reason you work as an artist is to stay open and ask questions.

I look at the artistic process as like experiencing the world, channeling it through your personality and sending it back out there. That's the process.

A painter may be looking at the world in a way which is very different from everyone else. If he's a craftsman, he can get other people to see the world through his eyes, and so he enlarges our vision, perception, and there's great value in that.

I see my studio like a laboratory, where I work like an investigator - it's almost forensic. I love the discovery process in painting.

Art is not for the cultivated taste. It is to cultivate taste.

I think when somebody's painting they don't necessarily... I'm not illustrating what I know. I'm mapping out, like topographically, some terrain I am satisfied with, how awkward that mark is.

I spend my time trying to figure art out. I was brought up to believe that the way one processes information is by making it into art. That's how I live my life.

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.

The first mistake of art is to assume that it's serious.

I think most people see drawing as subservient to the subject, a sort of meditation, a studying, a searching observation, in my case, for its own sake.

Most artists don't understand what they do, and I don't think we have to. Other people do that better - they understand what I do better than I do!

I think that one of the most important things that art can do is give you a reason to look at something, almost give you permission to look at something.

You don't have to compose a masterpiece every time, but I think the challenge of art is always searching for something different, searching for a new sensitivity, a new perspective, a new vision.

In the fine arts, as in many other things, we know well only what we have not learned.

I didn't see an abstract painting until I was 18, when I went to Vincent Price's house and saw Richard Niebencorn, Wolff, Jackson Pollack. He had an amazing collection. I didn't know people painted abstractly, I thought I was just doing something wholeheartedly.

In art, one does not aim for simplicity; one achieves it unintentionally as one gets closer to the real meaning of things.

With all their damned talk of modern painting, I've been forty years discovering that the queen of all colours is black!

When a painting is finished, it's like a new born child, and the artist himself must have time for understanding. How then do you expect an amateur to understand that which the artist dos not yet comprehend.

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

The art is just really mysterious. If I understood it more, maybe I would write more.

I think I realized it was an art form at the beginning, but it took me a really long time before I was able to view what I was performing myself as an art form.

Great art speaks a language which every intelligent person can understand. The people who call themselves modernists today speak a different language.

Summer is a great time to visit art museums, which offer the refreshing rinse of swimming pools - only instead of cool water, you immerse yourself in art.

For the artist, drawing is discovery. And that is not just a slick phrase; it is quite literally true.