John Baldessari Quotes

Why not spend that time on art: painting, sculpting, charcoal, pastel, oils? Are words or numbers more important than images? Who decides this? Does algebra move you to tears? Can plural possessives express the feelings in your heart? If you don't learn art now, you will never learn to breathe!

If you scratch a great photograph, you find two things; a painting and a photograph.

I guess art itself is insane. Its actual function is rarely clear, and yet people give their hearts and souls and lives to it, and have for all of history.

Painters were also attorneys, happy storytellers of anecdote, psychologists, botanists, zoologists, archaeologists, engineers, but there were no creative painters.

The paintings may communicate even better because people are lazy and they can look at a painting with less effort than they can read a poem.

Art is something that opens up and enhances your emotions and that's what I like to think I'm doing.

The exciting thing about doing art for someone else's story is how I can translate their world through pictures, and that's always a pretty big challenge.

The worst sin that can be committed against the artist is to take him at his word, to see in his work a fulfillment instead of an horizon.

For me, drawing is a way of navigating the imagination, and it remains the fundamental vehicle of my practice. Drawing allows me to be at my most inventive.

Art is an investigation.

Art is not for the cultivated taste. It is to cultivate taste.

I like to write about painting because I think visually. I see my writing as blocks of color before it forms itself. I think I also care about painting because I'm not musical. Painting to me is not a metaphor for writing, but something people do that can never be reduced to words.

I have a healthy view of what one can do with art.

I love visual art. I painted for many years when I was younger. I have studied modern/contemporary Indian art a bit and am very impressed with the talent in India.

The goal of art was the vital expression of self.

I crave to be able to photograph the way a painter paints - in a loose, expressive way.

Painting is the only universal language. All nature is creation's picture book. Painting alone can describe every thing which can be seen, and suggest every emotion which can be felt. Art reaches back into the babyhood of time, and is man's only lasting monument.

From childhood my mother had me examining Robert Mapplethorpe's style and Egon Schiele's framing - that's what modelling is about.

It's the idea of a multi-sensory experience stemming from music that opened my interest into painting, to be honest.

Life has to have the plenitude of art.

Fine art is really something I want to get into.

There were a series of moments when I decided that art was important, and it was an important vehicle for me to express my interest in spaces.

PowerPoint may not be of any use for you in a presentation, but it may liberate you in another way, an artistic way. Who knows.

I always thought that one of the reasons why a painter likes especially to have other painters look at his or her work is the shared experience of having pushed paint around.

I kind of write about visual art the way Roger Angell writes about baseball, which is to say, you're writing about life: it's a somewhat focused, limited terrain in which you write about everything.