Irving Stone Quotes

In the visual arts, particularly painting, I distrust all those abstractions, those artificial constructions. I have a very simple way of judging them: if I can do them, they are not art.

I happen to like Precisionism. It talks to me because I collect Cubism.

Painting is by nature a luminous language.

Decades ago, Gerhard Richter found a painterly philosopher's stone. Like Jackson Pollock before him, he discovered something that had been in painting all along, always overlooked or discounted.

Yes, I did, I mean I painted er, in a kind of abstract expressionist way, because of course that was exciting.

Actually, I love the Abstract Expressionists - or I like the ones I like, anyway.

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

I thought conceptual art was a joke.

In the past 10 years, I've looked at life as this Pollock stuff. And now I'm almost in the post Pollock phase.

I'm just really impressed by oil paintings - I don't see how people do it! That's the style I like: classic oil paintings. Abstract art just isn't my thing.

I like the transience of Klimt paintings.

Yes, you know sometimes, we started out thinking out how strange our painting was next to normal painting, which was anything expressionist. You forget that this has been thirty five years now and people don't look at it as if it were some kind of oddity.

If Art relates itself to an Object, it becomes descriptive, divisionist, literary.

Painting will have to deal more fully and less obliquely with life and nature's phenomena before it can again become great.

The earliest paintings I loved were always the most non-referential paintings you can imagine, by painters such as Mondrian. I was thrilled by them because they didn't refer to anything else. They stood alone, and they were just charged magic objects that did not get their strength from being connected to anything else.

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 older painting - well, it does have an effect all at once, I suppose, but it's of a lesser intensity than a lot of the American work in the last ten or fifteen years.

'Art or anti-art?' was the question I asked when I returned from Munich in 1912 and decided to abandon pure painting or painting for its own sake. I thought of introducing elements alien to painting as the only way out of a pictorial and chromatic dead end.

The point of painting is not really deception or imitation.

A great painting is a great painting.

Franz Kline, who became known for his black and white paintings, did a whole series of gorgeous landscapes and wonderful portraits that may still hang in Greenwich Village.

I'm not interested in pop art.

The trend in some of the contemporary movements in art, but by no means all, seems to deny this ideal and to me appears to lead to a purely decorative conception of painting.

I like to treat paint as material - to daub it, drop it, let it slide. There was Action Painting, but I also compare it to paint effects found on the streets. This approach is superimposed on a sculptural surface that is also 'painterly.'

I love Monet - I've nicknamed him King Blob. When you go up to the painting, it's a series of blobs - amazing.