Peter Wright Quotes

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

I wanted to be a painter, somewhere between Abstract Expressionism and Pop.

I paint abstract expressions.

He drove his kind of realism at me so hard I bounced right into nonobjective painting.

Well, let's say we acknowledged the School of French Painting - the Paris School of painting as the leading force and vitality of the time. I think that was understood and felt and experienced.

The paintings by Van Gough and Chagall had a big influence on me.

I always say Philadelphia, Pennsylvania is my biggest influence. But for painters, I like many, many painters, but I love Francis Bacon the most, and Edward Hopper.

Impressionism; it is the birth of Light in painting.

I influenced the BG style by not being able to draw perspective. The BG artists developed cool graphic painting styles to make my bad backgrounds look like they were that way on purpose.

The older painting - well, it does have an effect all at once, I suppose, but it's of a lesser intensity than a lot of the American work in the last ten or fifteen years.

The actual technique, the process of painting flat color and simple geometric edges, all dates from my time here on Coenties Slip.

I paint the American scene.

I'm not an Abstraction Expressionist, but I think dedication to paintings comes from an early interest in that work.

Blushes are fun. I like to do circles - like a Caravaggio painting almost, or Victorian looking.

The thrill of a photo-realist painter is if you get really close to the painting, it looks just like a photograph. Whereas in my case, if you get close to my paintings, they totally fall apart - so I'm about as far from a photo-realist as it gets.

If I had gone to art college and everybody was being a conceptual artist, I probably would have wanted to be a portrait or landscape painter.

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.

Ah, Manet has come very, very close to it and Courbet - the marrying of form and colour.

All I care about these days is painting — photography has never been more than a way into painting, a sort of instant drawing.

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.

Knowing what paint a painter uses or having an understanding of where he was in the history of where he came from doesn't hurt your appreciation of the painting.

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.

When you make a painting, even abstract, there is always a sort of necessary filling-in.

I like the transience of Klimt paintings.

Yes, you know sometimes, we started out thinking out how strange our painting was next to normal painting, which was anything expressionist. You forget that this has been thirty five years now and people don't look at it as if it were some kind of oddity.