Gerhard Richter Quotes

I don't know in advance what I am going to put on canvas any more than I decide beforehand what colours I am going to use.

As an artist, you don't think about the parabola or the arc you're describing or where you're going to ultimately end up, you're just kind of crawling around, seeing what's out there.

I enjoyed art in school. I've always done little drawings and stuff like that. I don't really know what I'm doing with the painting, but I experiment.

I work in whatever medium likes me at the moment.

I'll take anything and slap it on a canvas.

I never know what it's going to look like. Wouldn't be much point in painting if I already knew the outcome. I have a subject in front of me and I start flooding colour and making marks, I don't know, it's improvisation isn't it?

In using chance operations, the mind is enriched.

Art is a game. Too bad for him who makes a duty of it.

If you think about it enough to have a really articulate answer, you're not doing it right. That's how I feel about art. If your thought process could take you to knowing exactly what you're doing and why, there would be no point in making the art. It would become like propaganda. It's more nebulous than that.

I think half the point of painting a picture is that you don't know what will happen... that if painters did know what was going to happen they wouldn't bother to do it.

Painting today is pure intuition and luck and taking advantage of what happens when you splash the stuff down.

Never, never do I set to work on a canvas in the state it comes in from the shop. I provoke accidents - a form, a splotch of color. Any accident is good enough. I let the matiere decide. Then I prepare a ground by, for example, wiping my brushes on the canvas. Letting fall some drops of turpentine on it would do just as well. If I want to make a drawing I crumple the sheet of paper or I wet it; the flowing water traces a line and this line may suggest what is to come next.

The interesting thing about this is I don't know what my vision [ in Salome the play and Salomaybe] is yet about. I'm sensing something and I'm going along with it. It reminds me of a painting, the way Jackson Pollack painted - Jackson Pollack, the great, great artist.

When you're doing a movie, you're in a vacuum, just going, "Well, that's done. Let's see what happens."

Making art is a lot about just seeing what happens if you put some energy into something.

While you're making the film and working with the actors, if you want to have a little room to breathe and experiment and play, it grows, and you want that to happen. It's not enough to just shoot the script. You've gotta come up with new inspiration, as you shoot it. There's gotta be room for that and time for that, so it grows.

When I stand before a canvas, I never know what I'll do, and I am the first one surprised at what comes out.

To some extent I happily don't know what I'm doing. I feel that it's an artist's responsibility to trust that.

Artwork is not like a commercial business; there is no such thing as a schedule for art. You can't hurry art.

I just throw it out and see what happens. If it sounds and feels right, then I continue.

There's no way to really mock up or simulate what I'm doing until I'm there. An exhibition for me is not a statement but an experiment.

I never know what I'm going to put on the canvas. The canvas paints itself. I'm just the middleman.

Being in the studio is like painting, you know, you can really take your time, and try different things, and kind of go deep into it.

I come in. I'm going to sketch, I'm going to drape, I don't know what I'm going to do.

When I started 'Record Collection,' I had no idea that it would come out sounding the way that it did, and that's one of the best things about the creative process, taking turns with the things you didn't know.