Robert Mapplethorpe Quotes

Unlike the older, more humanly shaped arts, which begin with a seed and accumulate their form organically, photography clips its substance out of an actual continuum.

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

There still is some opposition to it in some museums and art schools, but I think photography has really grown into a mature art form.

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.

Art never improves, but... the material of art is never quite the same.

I photograph the things that I do not wish to paint, the things which already have an existence.

I had no intentions of going into sculpture but found that sculpture was just an extension of drawing.

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

It took me 40 years to find out that painting is not sculpture.

I love painting. As far as photography is concerned, I understand nothing.

I've always thought photography was an art form, but it had very low appreciation in the beginning, except for some Europeans, and of course Stieglitz. Stieglitz always considered photography to be an art form and is the "father" of the creative concepts of the twentieth century.

Photography is art when it's used by an artist.

If you scratch a great photograph, you find two things; a painting and a photograph.

I don't want to write, I'd rather draw.

Painting is a nail to which I fasten my ideas.

I've been working in sculpture and painting since 1920.

The spirit can assert itself only through the medium of clear form.

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.

If it weren't for how esoteric the art world likes to be, I would love actually to play the music in the shows, painting the music that influences me most.

The arts equally have distinct departments, and unless photography has its own possibilities of expression, separate from those of the other arts, it is merely a process, not an art.

I didn't do so well in the academic world, so I think the only way I could express myself was through visual art - anything I could get my hands on, whether it was glassblowing, sculpture, painting, or photography. I always wanted to be a painter. Or a farmer.

A contemporary artist can use the findings of all epochs and all styles, from the most primitive literary expressions up to the most refined products of the baroque.

Art is a continuum.

My work, in a certain way, got started in 1996 when I did an exhibition of thirteen paintings that were solely based on fashion imagery.

I couldn't go into the haphazard drawing or the paintings, the splashing of paint. I wanted to go back to a completely dry drawing, a dry conception of art.