Grimes Quotes

I have generally found that persons who had studied painting least were the best judges of it.

I seldom have my stuff up unless I'm testing it. If I'm worrying about a painting, I put it up and see if I detest it quickly or slowly. Otherwise I have things by other artists.

I certainly consider a great appreciation of painting to be the best indication of a most perfect mind.

The connoisseur of painting gives only bad advice to the painter. For that reason I have given up trying to judge myself.

Over and over again did the Attorney-General cry out aloud, in the agony of his cause, 'What is to become of painting if the critics withhold their lash?

Critics? Don't talk to me of critics! You think some jackanapes journalist, his soul eaten away by the maggots of jealousy and failure, has anything worthwhile to say of art? I don't.

How does an artist know when the line that he just painted is good or not good? That's the catch. De Kooning was the greatest of my contemporaries in art, and he knew when he'd done a good line. When he didn't, he threw it away. I wish I'd thrown away some of mine.

I stick the collages on the wall and, if I still like them after a month or two, I make a painting.

You are just as qualified as any expert to make a judgment and have a feeling or a response to any work of art.

When I see a new artist I give myself a lot of time to reflect and decide whether it's art or not.

The U.S. museums weren't looking at my paintings at all - they hated them, irredeemably. People metaphorically threw up when they saw my work! They thought I was enlarging comics, or just copying them.

Nobody is fully alive who cannot apply to art as much discrimination and appreciation as he applies to the work by which he earns his living.

It is no more easy to make a good picture than it is to find a diamond or a pearl. It means trouble and you risk your life for it.

Every art critic and every writer doesn't have a frame to start off from. If I made a statement saying, "This is Abstract Expressionism," they could go, "Well, he failed miserably," or, "Fantastic, this is a new genius!" But in art history, I don't see any of the artists I like spewing bullshit. I don't see anyone recording it or pronouncing what they were doing.

What really drives me mad about art is that, in America, the only thing you can do is to take it apart.

I was always very... impatient about showing my paintings to people.

In my vocabulary there are two bad words: art and good taste.

I read an article on me once that described my machine-method of silk-screen copying and painting: 'What a bold and audacious solution, what depths of the man are revealed in this solution!' What does that mean?

...she took her hand and raised her brush. For a moment it stayed trembling in a painful but exciting ecstacy in the air. Where to begin?--that was the question at what point to make the first mark? One line placed on the canvas committed her to innumerable risks, to frequent and irrevocable decisions. All that in idea seemed simple became in practice immediately complex; as the waves shape themselves symmetrically from the cliff top, but to the swimmer among them are divided by steep gulfs, and foaming crests. Still the risk must run; the mark made.

Basically painting is total idiocy.

It took me 40 years to find out that painting is not sculpture.

Every picture one paints involves not painting others.

Generally, I am opposed to painting which is concerned with conceptions of simplicity. Everything looks busy to me.

I put everything I can into a record. That's what art is for. I take a risk every time I do one with my whole being.

It is a gratification to me to know that I am ignorant of art... Because people who understand art find nothing in pictures but blemishes.