Mark Bradford Quotes

Art is always a search for understanding, and the different levels and frequencies of that search feel completely comfortable and natural to me.

The reason you work as an artist is to stay open and ask questions.

People shouldn't trust artists and they shouldn't trust art. Part of the fun of art is that it invites you to interpret it.

Part of the joy of looking at art is getting in sync in some ways with the decision-making process that the artist used and the record that's embedded in the work.

In art it is always as though the question is what the work of art is really about.

It's really interesting with art-movies too, but art especially - to see how your attitude toward artists and works and your level of appreciation of them is always shifting and changing over the years.

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

The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art - and, by analogy, our own experience - more, rather than less, real to us. The function of criticism should be to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means.

I think that one of the most important things that art can do is give you a reason to look at something, almost give you permission to look at something.

Obviously, something like ballet, you have music, you dance with the music and it's a very direct connection. With visual art, when there's no music that accompanies the art, such as great masterworks in a museum, you wind up interpreting what the artist is doing, how the artist made that work and what they're conveying.

What does art mean to me? I never really think about the 'meaning' of art. Yet, obviously, that's what I do.

I didn't see an abstract painting until I was 18, when I went to Vincent Price's house and saw Richard Niebencorn, Wolff, Jackson Pollack. He had an amazing collection. I didn't know people painted abstractly, I thought I was just doing something wholeheartedly.

It took me twenty years to discover painting: twenty years looking at nature, and above all, going to the Louvre.

A good piece of art raises questions.

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

Art experts are unfailingly opposed to Art for the simple reason that they are interested in Art - but Art is not interested in Art. Art is interested in life.

It became a question of taste. I have a certain taste in art history. And that - I had a huge library of art history books in my studio. And I would simply have the models go through those books with me, and we began a conversation about, like, what painting means, why we do it, why people care about it why or how it can mean or make sense today.

A painted surface is a real, living form.

The art is just really mysterious. If I understood it more, maybe I would write more.

What really drives me mad about art is that, in America, the only thing you can do is to take it apart.

The great art of the past became great because it started to go out of the perimeters that defined art and defined new territories.

I've always worked from images that already exist in our culture, and I just tweak them - I photograph my vision/interpretation of things that already exist, and I take it to the extreme. And then I make paintings or videos.

You don't have to compose a masterpiece every time, but I think the challenge of art is always searching for something different, searching for a new sensitivity, a new perspective, a new vision.

My popularity has to do with the divorce between modern art, where everything is obscure, and the viewer who often feels he needs a professor to tell them whether it's good or not. I believe a painting has to talk directly to the viewer, with composition, color and design, without a professor to explain it.

To me art is an adventure into an unknown world, which can be explored only by those willing to take the risk.