Peter Doig Quotes

Color is for me the purest form of expression, the purest abstract reality.

One can make no better investment than the cultivation of a taste for the beautiful, for it will bring rainbow hues and enduring joys to the whole life. It will not only greatly increase one's capacity for happiness, but also one's efficiency.

Art is inspiring. Walking into a gallery, or when the lights go up on a stage; that thrill of getting something that has nothing to do with acquisition.

Modeling, for me, isn't about being beautiful but creating something interesting for people to look at and think about.

The essence of all art is to have pleasure in giving pleasure.

I need art around me always.

I'm just wowed by the universe. I'm just glad to do something I love to do. I love color, I love painting, I love shapes, I love composition, I love the people around me. I'm adoring it all. My legacy is in the hands of other people.

The poet, the painter, the sculptor, the musican, the architect, seek each to concentrate this radiance of the world on one point, and each in his several work to satisfy the love of beauty which stimulates him to produce.

If painting is no longer needed, it seems a pity that some of us are born into the world with such a passion for line and color.

My motivation comes from a love of being creative. I'm in love with music and colour and laughter and dancing and all things that are beautiful.

To be full of joy when looking at an oeuvre is not a little thing.

Cobalt is a divine color and there is nothing as fine for putting an atmosphere round things. Carmine is the red of wine and is warm and lively like wine. The same goes for emerald green too. It's false economy to dispense with them, with those colors. Cadmium as well.

The ability to name poetry's gestures and rhetorics isn't required to write or read them, any more than a painter needs to know the physics of color to bring forward a landscape. The eye and hand and ear know what they need to know. Some of us want to know more, because knowing pleases.

Color, even more than drawing, is a means of liberation.

Beauty makes one lose one's head. Poetry is born of this decapitation

We become intoxicated with color, with words that speak of color, and with the sun that makes colors brighter.

The art of the colorist has in some ways elements of mathematics and music.

Lucifer is the patron saint of the visual arts. Color, form - all these are the work of Lucifer.

All we have, it seems to me, is the beauty of art and nature and life, and the love which that beauty inspires.

To explain away the mystery of a great painting - if such a feat were possible - would do irreparable harm... If there is no mystery, then there is no poetry, the quality I value above all else in art.

I begin my pictures under the effect of a shock which I feel and which makes me escape from reality... I need a point of departure, even if it's only a speck of dust or a flash of light.

Art is - representing the beautiful. There must be Art in everything.

Even luxuries are arranged according to ideas and ideals, to make them reflect as much of thought-life as possible - and this is Art.

I believe in Michelangelo, Velasquez, and Rembrandt; in the might of design, the mystery of color, the redemption of all things by Beauty everlasting, and the message of Art that has made these hands blessed. Amen. Amen.

Inspiration, move me brightly, light the song with sense and color, hold away despair