Eduardo Chillida Quotes

Among the mysteries of the creative ego is how the transcendence of what artists do is their own response to the darkness of who they are, and the same personal darkness that is at odds with the art is what propels artists to the light of what they create.

I don't want real life necessarily to be seen only as a context to heighten the deepness my work.

I think there are a lot of pictures to make. I sometimes question whether I'm even an artist or just a painter. To me, the making of the pictures is the most important thing.

I suppose I consider my work a kind of picture making.

The artist is called a creator.

Art is partly communication, but only partly. The rest is discovery.

Fight with yourself when you paint, not with the model. A student is one who struggles with himself for order.

Art is the path of the creator to his work.

I'm a painter, that's where I started out, at four years old, that was my first love as far as expression. So, I'm not a painter in the sense of, "Please come see my paintings" but, I do understand the value of not looking over the artist's shoulder while the work is in progress.

My paintings are only the ashes of my art

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.

I have long begged off the question of my albums reflecting where I am 'at' personally. There is more inaccuracy in that approach than accuracy.

The moment of creative impulse is what an artist gives you. You look at a Pollock, and it can't give you the tools to do a painting like that yourself, but in doing the work, Pollock shares with you the moment of creative impulse that drove him to do that work.

The use of the term art medium is, to say the least, misleading, for it is the artist that creates a work of art not the medium. It is the artist in photography that gives form to content by a distillation of ideas, thought, experience, insight and understanding.

No, I never had any dreams. The process of art is a dream in itself. The artist just doesn't... you work out something. It's yours. You don't have to go to sleep to do that. You do that on the canvas.

I've always said I'm more influenced in what I do by artists, and how they work, how they think, and the freedom they're given to work and think, than I really am by other writers.

In any art, you don't know in advance what you want to say - it's revealed to you as you say it. That's the difference between art and illustration.

Every now and then, I feel terribly uncomfortable with what I'm working on, and then I think maybe I am an artist. I'm not very articulate about it, but I do know that you have to follow your gut.

The task of art today is to bring chaos into order.

There are parts of me that I keep secret even from myself. I have demons and I'd love to be able to healthily look at the demons and still be a wonderful actor and not feel I need them to create.

But I think that's a particular kind of experience involving a certain immediacy between you and the canvass, you and the particular kind of experience of that particular moment.

We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.

My own position is, that it is largely up to the work itself to suggest the nature of these referential points without dimensions in and through the processes by which the distance between them is maintained.

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.

Painting what I experience, translating what I feel, is like a great liberation. But it is also work, self-examination, consciousness, criticism, struggle.