John Tenniel Quotes

There is no abstract art. You must always start with something. Afterward you can remove all traces of reality.

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.

I never use nature as a starting point. I never abstract from nature; I never consciously think of nature when I paint.

Anything can be painted without representation.

I only understand realism.

But, after all, the aim of art is to create space - space that is not compromised by decoration or illustration, space within which the subjects of painting can live.

I've heard my work called 'bold' and 'graffiti-like,' but for me it is always instinctual. I start with a shape or a colour and go from there.

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

The natural does not have to be a specific representation. I am now working on a thing which is a reconstruction of a starry sky, yet I make it, nevertheless, without a given in nature.

My art has no object, no image, no point of focus.

If you want to paint the inner life, you paint it from the exterior. From the exterior, you breathe the inner life into your painting.

I felt the most intense pleasure in piercing the stone in order to make an abstract form and space; quite a different sensation from that of doing it for the purpose of realism.

You don't get inspiration sitting at a drawing board or in front of your computer.

I want my pictures to be things. I want them to be made up of marks that are physically and individually self-sufficient.

At that point it certainly would be called abstract. That is to say, you had a model and there'd be one or two or three people there drawing the model but otherwise you had abstractions all around the room, even though the model was in front of you.

The big shock of my life was Abstract Expressionism - Pollock, de Kooning, those guys. It changed my work. I was an academically trained student, and suddenly you could pour paint, smear it on, broom it on!

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 think when somebody's painting they don't necessarily... I'm not illustrating what I know. I'm mapping out, like topographically, some terrain I am satisfied with, how awkward that mark is.

I don't work from drawings. I don't make sketches and drawings and color sketches into a final painting.

I try to construct a picture in which shapes, spaces, colors, form a set of unique relationships, independent of any subject matter. At the same time I try to capture and translate the excitement and emotion aroused in me by the impact with the original idea.

My process is really quite organic, and starting a painting is one of the best parts for me. I always start in quite a loose and free way. I often put down one ground colour to begin with and then play off that.

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.

I think of painting without subject matter as music without words.

The basis for my own work during the years just before coming to America in 1915 was a desire to break up forms - to 'decompose' them much along the lines the cubists had done. But I wanted to go further - much further - in fact, in quite another direction altogether.

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