Damian Loeb Quotes

It doesn't make much difference how the paint is put on as long as something has been said. Technique is just a means of arriving at a statement.

My work, in a certain way, got started in 1996 when I did an exhibition of thirteen paintings that were solely based on fashion imagery.

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

Ironically, my paintings don't photograph well.

I'd like to write the way Matisse paints.

Art does not, like science, set forth a permanent order of nature, the enduring skeleton of law. Two factors primarily determine its works: one is the idea in the mind of the artist, the other is his power of expression; and both these factors are extremely variable.

I suppose I consider my work a kind of picture making.

Modern pictures banish depiction for interfering with the workings of paint.

One could go on for ever as to whether the paint should be thick or thin, whether to paint the woman or the square, hard-edge or soft, but after a while such questions become a bore. They are merely problems in aesthetics, having only to do with the outer man.

Then you learn about composition, you learn about old masters, you form certain ideas about structure. But the inhuman activity of trying to make some kind of jump or leap, where , the painting is always saying, 'What do you want from me? I can only be a painting.' You have to go from part to part, but you shouldn't see yourself go from part to part, that's the whole point.

As an artist, you want to play around with mediums and see if you can get the point across in different way.

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.

To create a work of art is to create the world.

This truth must be recognized as a dogma and assume the validity of an axiom in the general understanding of painting.

By making pictures, you learn the many different properties of photography. I use those properties differently than, say, an advertising agency would, but we're both operating in the same reality. A face painted by Picasso occupies the same reality as a portrait by Stieglitz.

Making art is different for everyone.

The painter constructs, the photographer discloses.

I believe that the great painters with their intellect as master have attempted to force this unwilling medium of paint and canvas into a record of their emotions.

The body, in 'La Belle Noiseuse,' was the source of the artist's creativity.

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 couldn't go into the haphazard drawing or the paintings, the splashing of paint. I wanted to go back to a completely dry drawing, a dry conception of art.

In the arts the way in which an idea is rendered, and the manner in which it is expressed, is much more important than the idea itself.

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.

You can't make a perfect painting. We can see perfection in our minds. But we can't make a perfect painting.

Art is the human disposition of sensible or intelligible matter for an esthetic end.