Laurie Simmons Quotes

I tend to get very suspicious of anything that thinks it's art while it's being created.

I've always felt the portrait is an occasion for marks to happen. I've never viewed the portrait as about the sitter. Even when I go to the National Portrait Gallery, I'm not thinking about the sitter; I'm thinking about how the artist chose that color or that highlight. It becomes about the time, place, and context.

I think it was Roger Fry who first coined what he took to be a final definition of a work of art, whether it was a painting, building, poem or Hepplewhite chair. He said that the best works of art are finished products that preserve 'a valuable state of mind'.

I think what makes people think that is because of things people write. It really doesn't have anything to do with the artist.

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

I make pictures and someone comes in and calls it art.

I think most paintings are a record of the decisions that the artist made. I just perhaps make them a little clearer than some people have.

It is through observation and perception of atmosphere that he [the artist] can register the feeling that he wishes his painting to give out.

Everything an artist spits is art.

Aesthetic value is often the by-product of the artist striving to do something else.

What is drawing? Not once in describing the shape of the mass did I shift my eyes from the model. Why? Because I wanted to be sure that nothing evaded my grasp of it... My objective is to test to what extent my hands already feel what my eyes see.

How do you complete a painting, really? There are paintings by so many different artists that are interesting precisely because they haven't really been completed.

I don't think the meaning in my paintings comes from just using broken dishes.

If I was an artist, and I was in the studio, then whatever I was doing in the studio must be art.

The closer and more completely you can come to explaining what a work of art means, the less like art it seems.

If the mystical lovers of the arts, who consider all criticism dissection and all dissection destruction of enjoyment, thought logically, an exclamation like "Goodness alive!" would be the best criticism of the most deserving work of art. There are critiques which say nothing but that, only they do so more extensively.

I doubt that art needed Ruskin any more than a moving train needs one of its passengers to shove it.

I kind of think that artists throughout history, poets throughout history have been criticized for sharing what's on people's minds and I don't think it's any different now.

Art needs to stand for something.

In America, we know to ignore artists if they're serious in any way.

Henry James proposed asking of art three modest and appropriate questions: What is the artist trying to do? Does he do it? Was it worth doing?

When an artist explains what he is doing, he usually has to do one of two things: either scrap what he has explained, or make his work fit in with the explanation.

Artists are valuable to public discussion: They show the correlation between doing and thinking.

One of the grotesqueries of present-day American life is the amount of reasoning that goes into displaying the wisdom secreted in bad movies while proving that modern art is meaningless. They have put into practice the notion that a bad art work cleverly interpreted according to some obscure Method is more rewarding than a masterpiece wrapped in silence.