Faith Ringgold Quotes

I am a great lover of art, in many forms: paintings, objets, textiles. I don't have the talent for painting, but I have a very good sense of colour, a love of visual beauty.

Everyone discusses my art and pretends to understand, as if it were necessary to understand, when it is simply necessary to love.

The first impression of a work of art is its otherness from reality.

The paintings may communicate even better because people are lazy and they can look at a painting with less effort than they can read a poem.

Art is not what you see, but what you make others see.

I have to say that I reject somewhat the distinction between something called art and something called public art. I think all art demands and desires to be seen.

The pictures I make come from every blink of my lashes.

What is art but a way of seeing?

All that we call ideal in Greek or any other art, because to us it is false and visionary, was, to the makers of it, true and existent.

Every viewer is going to get a different thing. That's the thing about painting, photography, cinema.

You don't have to know anything about art to appreciate it or to look at it. There aren't any hidden secrets or things that you're supposed to understand.

The works of previous artists have come from their own experiences or insights but haven't given the experience itself. They had set themselves up as a sort of interpreter to the layman... Our interest is in a form where you realize that the media are just perception.

I think everybody starts out by seeing a few works of art and wanting to do something like them. You want to understand what you see, what is there, and you try to make a picture out of it. Later you realize that you can't represent reality at all - that what you make represents nothing but itself, and therefore is itself reality.

Art is the microscope of the mind, which sharpens the wit as the other does the sight; and converts every object into a little universe in itself. Art may be said to draw aside the veil from nature. To those who are perfectly unskilled in the practice, unimbued with the principles of art, most objects present only a confused mass.

Art is not there simply to be understood. ... It is more the sense of an indication or suggestion.

Art is a foreign city, and we deceive ourselves when we think it familiar. We have to recognize that the language of art, all art, is not our mother tongue.

When a painting is finished, it's like a new born child, and the artist himself must have time for understanding. How then do you expect an amateur to understand that which the artist dos not yet comprehend.

In Rome it seems as if there were so many things which are more wanted in the world than pictures.

Your poems are rather hard to understand, whereas your paintings are so easy. Easy? Of course - you paint flowers and girls and sunsets; things that everybody understands. I never met him. Who? Everybody. Did you ever hear of nonrepresentational painting? I am. Pardon me? I am a painter, and painting is nonrepresentational. Not all painting. No: housepainting is representational. And what does a housepainter represent? Ten dollars an hour. In other words, you don't want to be serious - It takes two to be serious.

What Degas called 'a way of seeing' must consequently bear a wide enough interpretation to include way of being, power, knowledge, and will.

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

Well, art is art, isn't it? Still, on the other hand, water is water.

I suppose an artist takes the elements of his life and rearranges them and then has them perceived by others as though they were the elements of their lives.

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

The important thing is to remember what most impressed you and to put it on canvas as fast as possible.