Gerhard Richter Quotes

What is drawing? Not once in describing the shape of the mass did I shift my eyes from the model. Why? Because I wanted to be sure that nothing evaded my grasp of it... My objective is to test to what extent my hands already feel what my eyes see.

I can't work without a model. I won't say I turn my back on nature ruthlessly in order to turn a study into a picture, arranging the colors, enlarging and simplifying; but in the matter of form I am too afraid of departing from the possible and the true.

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

At that point it certainly would be called abstract. That is to say, you had a model and there'd be one or two or three people there drawing the model but otherwise you had abstractions all around the room, even though the model was in front of you.

To paint is a possessing rather than a picturing.

I think most paintings are a record of the decisions that the artist made. I just perhaps make them a little clearer than some people have.

I tend to get very suspicious of anything that thinks it's art while it's being created.

In many ways my paintings are about energy — both in how they are created and the image itself.

I was trying. I was crawling. I was coming into myself. I was trying to in some ways get beyond - what is the word that I'm looking for? - metaphorical language in painting, and to create something that was more indexical. And what I mean by that is that when you go to the library there's an index card that refers to a book that's actual and real in the world. So that index relates to something real.

Art is not living. It is the use of living. The artist has the ability to take the living and use it in a certain way and produce art.

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.

An odd contradiction, if the layman were correct in his unconscious assumption that an artist begins with reality and ends with art: the converse is true - to the degree that this dichotomy has any truth - the artist begins with art, and through it arrives at reality.

You take a painting, you have a white, virginal piece of canvas that is the world of purity, and then you put your imagery on it, and you try to bring it back to the original purity.

If you scratch a great photograph, you find two things; a painting and a photograph.

Real artists take the misery and sadness of life and translate it into art.

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.

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

I think my masks reference artists who reference primitivism. They're not directly connected to tribal arts. I think they look more like third-grade art projects.

Painting is a nail to which I fasten my ideas.

I often avoid using the terms 'figuration' and 'abstraction' because I've always tried to have it both ways. I want the experience of looking at one of my paintings to be similar to the process of making the painting - you go from the big picture to something very intense and detailed, and then back again.

Art doesn't transform. It just plain forms.

By making pictures, you learn the many different properties of photography. I use those properties differently than, say, an advertising agency would, but we're both operating in the same reality. A face painted by Picasso occupies the same reality as a portrait by Stieglitz.

Art has been good for my soul. And it's been good for my brain. I think I'm a better painter now than I was a musician growing up. You struggle to see things and translate an image through your hands to a canvas.

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

My painting does not come from the easel.