Matthew Williamson Quotes

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.

I painted the picture, and in the colors the rhythm of the music quivers. I painted the colors I saw.

At that point it certainly would be called abstract. That is to say, you had a model and there'd be one or two or three people there drawing the model but otherwise you had abstractions all around the room, even though the model was in front of you.

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.

People understand what art is supposed to look like, and so it's easy to make something that looks like art but isn't - especially in an abstract form.

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.

In this movement of colors I find the essence, which does not arise from a system, or an a priori theory.

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.

Once my paintings are complete, the model no longer lives in the painting as themselves. I see something bigger, more symbolic - an archetype.

Every good composition is above all a work of abstraction. All good painters know this. But the painter cannot dispense with subjects altogether without his work suffering impoverishment.

I have been continuously aware that in painting, I am always dealing with... a relational structure. Which in turn makes permission 'to be abstract' no problem at all.

The abstract artist has given material existence to many unseen worlds and tempi.

I was trying. I was crawling. I was coming into myself. I was trying to in some ways get beyond - what is the word that I'm looking for? - metaphorical language in painting, and to create something that was more indexical. And what I mean by that is that when you go to the library there's an index card that refers to a book that's actual and real in the world. So that index relates to something real.

For a painter as abstract as myself, the collages offer a way of incorporating bits of the everyday world into pictures.

I hang my work upside down to emphasize surface.

A bit of advice, don't copy nature too closely. Art is an abstraction; as you dream amid nature, extrapolate art from it, and concentrate on what you will create as a result.

I love art. It is uplifting.

Painting is an essentially concrete art and can only consist of the representation of real and existing things. It is a completely physical language, the words of which consist of all visible objects. An object which is abstract, not visible, non-existent, is not within the realm of painting.

Abstract art is only painting. And what's so dramatic about that? There is no abstract art. One must always begin with something. Afterwards one can remove all semblance of reality; there is no longer any danger as the idea of the object has left an indelible imprint.

Painting took on a fabulous strength and splendor; the object was discredited as an indispensable element of the picture.

Drawing is a kind of hypnotism: one looks in such a way at the model, that he comes and takes a seat on the paper.

I devour nature ceaselessly. I exaggerate, sometimes I make changes in the subject; but still I don't invent the whole picture. On the contrary, I find it already there. It's a question of picking out what one wants from nature.

In all great arts, as in trees, it is the height that charms us; we care nothing for the roots or trunks, yet it could not be without the aid of these.

My tendency towards bareness and simplification has been practiced in three fields: modeling, colors, and the figuration of the personages.