Martine Syms Quotes

As an artist, you want to play around with mediums and see if you can get the point across in different way.

Everything I do, it's a bit painterly. I like being surrounded by objects, mostly on paper. I like the images. I like the painting. I like good photography. It's something that makes me an emotional connection, and I feel comfortable around it.

Animation can explain whatever the mind of man can conceive. This facility makes it the most versatile and explicit means of communication yet devised for quick mass appreciation.

A drawing is essentially a private work, related only to the artist's own needs; a 'finished' statue or canvas is essentially a public, presented work - related far more directly to the demands of communication.

I don't necessarily think that installation is the only way to go. It's just a label for certain kinds of arrangements.

Drawing is like making an expressive gesture with the advantage of permanence.

You don't paint pictures to put them in your attic. You want people to look at them.

I think that has been a benefit to me because I think most people understand quilts and not a lot of people understand paintings. But yet they're looking at one.

I feel uncomfortable with the term public art, because I'm not sure what it means. If it means what I think it does, then I don't do it. I'm not crazy about categories.

Painting is the only universal language. All nature is creation's picture book. Painting alone can describe every thing which can be seen, and suggest every emotion which can be felt. Art reaches back into the babyhood of time, and is man's only lasting monument.

I'm an artist who works with pictures and words. Sometimes that stuff ends up in different kinds of sites and contexts which determine what it means and looks like.

Painting is the frozen evidence of a performance.

When I'm making a collage, there are a lot of things about it that are violent.

I believe that when you go into a gallery or a museum, the most powerful pieces are the ones that don't have the words in the corner that distract you from the larger piece.

The plastic artist may or may not be concerned with presenting a superficial appearance of reality, but he is always concerned with the presentation - if not the representation - of the plastic values of reality.

The good photograph is not the object, the consequences of the photograph are the objects.

When you think of painting as painting it is rather absurd. The real world is before us - glorious sunlight and activity and fresh air, and high speed motor cars and television, all the animation - a world apart from a little square of canvas that you smear paint on.

Neither is there figurative and non-figurative art. All things appear to us in the shape of forms. Even in metaphysics ideas are expressed by forms. Well then, think how absurd it would be to think of painting without the imagery of forms. A figure, an object, a circle, are forms; they affect us more or less intensely.

If the man who paints only the tree, or flower, or other surface he sees before him were an artist, the king of artists would be the photographer. It is for the artist to do something beyond this.

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

If I had been born one or two hundred years ago, I might have been a sculptor, but photography is a very quick way to see, to make sculpture.

It entered the visual vocabulary of photographers, painters and sculptors and focused on what pictures and words look like and what they can mean.

To talk about paintings is not only difficult but perhaps pointless too. You can only express in words what words are capable of expressing-- what language can communicate. Painting has nothing to do with that.

Why talk about sculpture when I can photograph it?

Paintings invariably sum up; photographs usually do not. Photographic images are pieces of evidence in an ongoing biography or history. And one photograph, unlike one painting, implies that there will be others.