Jenny Holzer Quotes

How does an artist know when the line that he just painted is good or not good? That's the catch. De Kooning was the greatest of my contemporaries in art, and he knew when he'd done a good line. When he didn't, he threw it away. I wish I'd thrown away some of mine.

But I think that's a particular kind of experience involving a certain immediacy between you and the canvass, you and the particular kind of experience of that particular moment.

I don't see myself as a photographer. I still see the photographs and collages as a resource for the painting.

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

Painting is the silence of thought and the music of sight.

I'm a painter, that's where I started out, at four years old, that was my first love as far as expression. So, I'm not a painter in the sense of, "Please come see my paintings" but, I do understand the value of not looking over the artist's shoulder while the work is in progress.

No one is an artist unless he carries his picture in his head before painting it, and is sure of his method and composition.

I'm not knocking conceptual art; it's another department, but it doesn't move me like painting.

Every artist is supposed to get emotional. You're painting pictures of emotions.

Preliminary drawings or sketches in oil or pastel often have an immediacy and emotional appeal far greater than the final canvas.

Painting is a nail to which I fasten my ideas.

The use of the term art medium is, to say the least, misleading, for it is the artist that creates a work of art not the medium. It is the artist in photography that gives form to content by a distillation of ideas, thought, experience, insight and understanding.

It is not your paintings I like, it is your painting.

The great thing about doing art shows is you get to meet the people who are interested in your art, and I think that when you're purchasing a piece of art it's a tremendous bonus to get to meet the artist because you get a chance to pick their brain a bit and find out first hand what the piece is about for the artist.

I stick the collages on the wall and, if I still like them after a month or two, I make a painting.

Whatever an artist's personal feelings are, as soon as an artist fills a certain area on the canvas or circumscribes it, he becomes historical. He acts from or upon other artists.

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.

I have to take it as a given that I have got a certain ability to do something. I can be an artist, which is take something and transform it into another thing. I can just see something, and I can see my painting.

There is only one true thing: instantly paint what you see. When you've got it, you've got it. When you haven't, you begin again. All the rest is humbug.

In my experience a painting is not made with colors and paint at all. I don't know what a painting is; who knows what sets off even the desire to paint?

Painting is the most magical of mediums. The transcendence is truly amazing to me every time I go to a museum and I see how somebody figured another way to rub colored dirt on a flat surface and make space where there is no space or make you think of a life experience.

The things that I paint are things that I know very well.

We try to buy from living artists because we love to understand why they are painting or sculpting and get into their minds.

I'm inspired by art - in whatever form it takes. I love when I see a painting or a photograph that captures my attention.

I started as a visual artist and I've always dealt with music in that same sort of way.