Claes Oldenburg Quotes

What interests me most is neither still life nor landscape, but the human figure.

... landscapes or still-lifes I paint in between the abstract works; they constitute about one-tenth of my production. On the one hand they are useful, because I like to work from nature - although I do use a photograph - because I think that any detail from nature has a logic I would like to see in abstraction as well.

I came down successfully through Picasso and Braque, down through Pollock, I guess, but I began to stop at Franz Kline and the Abstractionists. I like their design, brilliant design, marvelous color layers. But I don't find any human content there. I'm from an old school, and painting has to have human content for me.

I had rather see the portrait of a dog that I know, than all the allegorical paintings they can show me in the world.

Painting is the representation of visible forms. The essence of realism is its negation of the ideal.

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

I'm not interested in pop art.

I studied realism when I was in art school.

Portraiture is something that we're all drawn to. I think primarily other forms - we prefer, by and large, to look at human beings than a bowl of fruit.

I first had no interest in figuration whatsoever.

In art there are two principal schools between which each aspirant has to choose--one distinguished by its close adherence to nature, and the other by its strenuous efforts to get above it.

To me, a drop of oil paint or a xerographic dot are the same thing - they're all just language.

The reason I don't like realist, photorealist, neorealist, or whatever, is that I am as interested in the artificial as I am in the real.

I used to paint landscapes without any people in them but now I paint people who happen to be in a particular place. They might be outside a pub, or on a beach or in a studio. They might have clothes on or they might not.

When I look at some of my old work, the pieces I find most interesting are the ones with people in them.

In Giacometti's work, the armature has once again become the life-line of the sculpture, and also, he's brought back to sculpture a nervous sensitivity which the 'pure carving' side of sculpture can lose sight of altogether.

I have done only two portraits: one of the artist Francesco Clemente and another of Andy Warhol.

I had no intentions of going into sculpture but found that sculpture was just an extension of drawing.

I love many realists but very strongly resist the notion that realism presents a less stylized, more authentic version of the world.

I think I'm just generally more interested in figuration than abstraction. I think that painting abstraction often feels like painting colors to me, whereas portraits always feel like something connected. I like the exchange, the collaborative aspect of sitter and subject for sure.

Doing representations of real people is not my strongpoint as a visual artist, and I know that.

If you think about art, if you look at Rembrandt and Vermeer and Caravaggio, if you look at Turner and Constable and all the Impressionists and the Hudson River School, there's a tradition of light in art, especially painting.

I don't paint women, I paint pictures. . . What I am after above all is expression. If in a portrait I put eyes, a nose, a mouth, there isn't much use; on the contrary it paralyses the imagination of the spectator, and obliges us to see the person in a certain way.

Nothing is really so poor and melancholy as art that is interested in itself and not in its subject.

Even with painting, even abstract paintings, you need the incoming of, light on the canvas.