Gerhard Richter Quotes

I think a photograph, of whatever it might be - a landscape, a person - requires personal involvement. That means knowing your subject, not just snapping at what's in front of you.

A man paints with his brains and not with his hands.

My attitude towards drawing is not necessarily about drawing. It's about making the best kind of image I can make, it's about talking as clearly as I can.

I want paint to work as flesh.

I think it was Roger Fry who first coined what he took to be a final definition of a work of art, whether it was a painting, building, poem or Hepplewhite chair. He said that the best works of art are finished products that preserve 'a valuable state of mind'.

The true artist is quite rational as well as imaginative and knows what he is doing; if he does not, his art suffers.

All works of art should begin... at the end.

I always wanted to show the world that art is everywhere, except it has to pass through a creative mind.

Arguments against photography ever being considered a fine art are: the element of chance which enters in, — finding things ready-made for a machine to record, and of course the mechanics of the medium. I say that chance enters into all branches of art.

If I set out to sculpt a standing man and it becomes a lying woman, I know I am making art.

In literary art, as in the art of the architect, the painter, the musician, signs that the artist is thinking of his own achievement more than of his subject always offend me.

Every picture one paints involves not painting others.

The thing has already taken form in my mind before I start it. The first attempts are absolutely unbearable. I say this because I want you to know that if you see something worthwhile in what I am doing, it is not by accident but because of real direction and purpose.

If what I see in my mind excites me, there is a good chance it will make a good photograph.

l photograph what l do not wish to paint and l paint that which l cannot photograph.

Art is foremost a state of mind, and only secondarily a problem of form.

No good work whatever can be perfect, and the demand for perfection is always a sign of a misunderstanding of the ends of art.

The true poem is the poet's mind.

What you do when you paint, you take a brush full of paint, get paint on the picture, and you have faith.

All you need to paint is a few tools, a little instruction, and a vision in your mind.

He that seeks popularity in art closes the door on his own genius: as he must needs paint for other minds, and not for his own.

I find it hard to believe that the machine would go into the creative artist's hand even were that magic hand in true place. It has been too far exploited by industrialism and science at expense to art and true religion.

So I said to myself-I'll paint what I see-what the flower is to me but I'll paint it big and they will be surprised into taking the time to look at it-I will make even busy New Yorkers take time to see what I see of flowers.

The artistic impulse seems not to wish to produce finished work. It certainly deserts us half-way, after the idea is born; and if we go on, it is labor.

That's the difference between the serious artist and the craftsman--the craftsman can take material and because of his abilities do a professional job of it. The serious artist, like Proust, is like an object caught by a wave and swept to shore. He's obsessed by his material; it's like a venom working in his blood and the art is the antidote.