Diego Rivera Quotes

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.

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

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.

The things that I paint are things that I know very well.

When you start with a portrait and try to find pure form by abstracting more and more, you must end up with an egg.

To abstract is to draw out the essence of a matter. To abstract in art is to separate certain fundamentals from irrelevant material which surrounds them.

You can be sure that a painter reveals himself in his work as much as and more than a writer does in his.

Being so pathetic, I don't read. I just ... do things - writing out interviews you can't read, on pictures of footprints and things like that. I kind of like the idea of nailing the thing down and not really showing too much about it. There's just so much you can take for collage nowadays.

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

I'm not knocking conceptual art; it's another department, but it doesn't move me like painting.

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 drawing is essentially a private work, related only to the artist's own needs; a 'finished' statue or canvas is essentially a public, presented work - related far more directly to the demands of communication.

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

I painted the picture, and in the colors the rhythm of the music quivers. I painted the colors I saw.

What is bad painting? Picabia made some deliberately bad paintings, but they were by him, so great in a way.

This truth must be recognized as a dogma and assume the validity of an axiom in the general understanding of painting.

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.

Some painters transform the sun into a yellow spot, others transform a yellow spot into the sun.

Art is not about thinking something up. It is the opposite - getting something down.

My work, in a certain way, got started in 1996 when I did an exhibition of thirteen paintings that were solely based on fashion imagery.

To paint is a possessing rather than a picturing.

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.

Adam does most of the work when it comes to videos and he basically does the same as I do with the lyrics. The videos are his visual interpretations of our music.

In every respect, fantasy is like doing abstract paintings.