Jonathan Nolan Quotes

I don't think that my art isn't serious. I think the subjects are not serious, or my treatments of the subjects are not serious. But then, I'm also putting down subject, because like the abstract expressionists, I don't think the subject is important.

I am unable to make any distinction between the feeling I get from life and the way I translate that feeling into painting.

My work has never been autobiographical. Although the subjects are driven on a personal perspective it's sort of elevated above me. I try to express something that is more a collective expression of crisis.

I just try to find targets I feel something about and express it my way.

I don't deal in technique. I deal in emotions.

Each man must take the material that he finds at hand, see that in it there are the big truths of life, the fundamentally big forces, and then express in his art whatever is the cause of his pleasure.

For me, drawing is everything, because it informs everything. It even informs my poetry. It's the way I begin everything.

I'm not a journalist; I'm a poet. I had a discourse, an encounter with these people but I never had a list of questions.

I direct in the same way that I act, which is thinking about what the scene needs.

For a poet, making poems is a way of viewing the world, being in the world, breathing.

It just seemed to me that the way I played was nice. I could hear it myself.

Not what man knows but what man feels, concerns art. All else is science.

I was never the kind of painter or sculptor who kept a shop.

Painting is the pattern of one's own nervous system being projected on canvas.

An artist chooses his subjects: that is the way he praises.

I understood that I was inventing myself, and that I was doing this more in the way of a painter than in the way of a scientist. I could not count on precision or calculation; I could only count on intuition.

For me, the subject is of secondary importance: I want to convey what is alive between me and the subject.

The role of the writer is not simply to arrange Being according to his own lights; he must also serve as a medium to Being and remain open to its often unfathomable dictates. This is the only way the work can transcend its creator and radiate its meaning...

Poems are always interested in what Ivan Illich called 'shadow work,' not least because that is no small part of their own way of working.

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

Art begins . . . when someone interprets, when someone sees the world through his own eyes. Art happens when what is seen becomes mixed with the inside of the person who is seeing it.

Painting is a strange business.

Thus art is not an object, it is an experience.

The job of taste was to thin the insane torrent of human creativity down to manageable levels. But the job of appetite was never to be happy with taste.

All paintings start out of a mood, out of a relationship with things or people, out of a complete visual impression. To call this expression abstract seems to me often to confuse the issue. Abstract means literally to draw from or separate. In this sense every artist is abstract . . . a realistic or non-objective approach makes no difference. The result is what counts.