Adam Gopnik Quotes

You're confusing product with process. Most people, when they criticize, whether they like it or hate it, they're talking about product. That's not art, that's the result of art. Art, to whatever degree we can get a handle on (I'm not sure that we really can) is a process. It begins in the heart and the mind with the eyes and hands.

Sane judgment abhors nothing so much as a picture perpetrated with no technical knowledge, although with plenty of care and diligence.

I have a fondness for making paintings that go beyond just having a conversation about art for art's sake or having a conversation about art history. I actually really enjoy looking at broader popular culture.

Leave to the masters of art trained by a lifetime of devotion the wonderful process of picture-building and picture creation. Go out into the sunlight and be happy with what you see.

Warhol influenced me because of his writing. If I had never read his writings and interviews, I would never have understood his work.

In spite the mountains of books written about art, no precise definition of art has been constructed. And the reason for this is that the conception of art has been based on the conception of beauty.

All art is but dirtying the paper delicately.

It present to allow me to ask myself questions about what I'm doing. I think that's what visual art does - it either reminds you of something or allows you to question something. I don't know why Robert Motherwell; I love so many different artists.

Then you learn about composition, you learn about old masters, you form certain ideas about structure. But the inhuman activity of trying to make some kind of jump or leap, where , the painting is always saying, 'What do you want from me? I can only be a painting.' You have to go from part to part, but you shouldn't see yourself go from part to part, that's the whole point.

One day, in the San Francisco walk, he came upon some badly painted figures and observed that good painters imitate nature but bad ones vomit it forth.

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

Painting is the only universal language. All nature is creation's picture book. Painting alone can describe every thing which can be seen, and suggest every emotion which can be felt. Art reaches back into the babyhood of time, and is man's only lasting monument.

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

My first concern was to take care of my drawing. I did not have any knowledge in arts, especially Haitian arts, apart from the paintings I saw in my father's office.

Painting is the most magical of mediums. The transcendence is truly amazing to me every time I go to a museum and I see how somebody figured another way to rub colored dirt on a flat surface and make space where there is no space or make you think of a life experience.

I am able to write musically about the visual. I can pick up tones, I can pick up themes. And I find visual art is a wonderful launching-off place.

When I have used cartoon images, I've used them ironically to raise the question, 'Why would anyone want to do this with modern painting?'

Clare Henderson creates the most beautiful delicate prints and paintings.

I don't see myself as a photographer. I still see the photographs and collages as a resource for the painting.

A contemporary artist like Grayson Perry is brilliant partly because of his expert knowledge of art history, not despite it.

That's what art is. You don't make up stories. You live your life.

I think about art a lot only in two contexts. One is narrative... The other thing that I'm interested in, which is tangential, but not unrelated... All art to me is about problem solving.

I was getting tired of hearing the complaint, "My kid could do this," and "We don't get it. What's modern art? Blah, blah, blah." And I wondered what would really happen if you gave people what they wanted, something they always look at.

Art is mind and heart and touch as much and more than it is mere instrument, technique - without which however it cannot exist at all.

When you think of painting as painting it is rather absurd. The real world is before us - glorious sunlight and activity and fresh air, and high speed motor cars and television, all the animation - a world apart from a little square of canvas that you smear paint on.