Bob Ross Quotes

One of the things you do when you make a piece of art is you try to make the world you'd rather be in.

To create a work of art is to create the world.

Painting is not for me either decorative amusement, or the plastic invention of felt reality; it must be every time: invention, discovery, revelation.

Unlike fashion, art isn't applied. It doesn't have to serve anybody. It doesn't have to be there for any other reason than to give an impression of what the world is about.

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.

I'm never interested in the painting being a mirror to culture. I think that's really boring. What I'm interested in is painting as an affective space. The place where the hierarchies of the world can be rearranged within the space of a painting. And they can be articulated in different ways.

Not all paintings are abstract; they're not all Jackson Pollock. There's value in a photograph of a man alone on a boat at sea, and there is value in painting of a man alone on a boat at sea. In the painting, the painting has more freedom to express an idea, more latitude in being able to elicit certain emotion.

You can't stop an artist from expressing his views through art.

I don't paint women, I paint pictures. . . What I am after above all is expression. If in a portrait I put eyes, a nose, a mouth, there isn't much use; on the contrary it paralyses the imagination of the spectator, and obliges us to see the person in a certain way.

If a work of art is to explore new environments, it is not to be regarded as a blueprint but rather as a form of action-painting.

People take things a little too personal. I write these songs, and they're experiments with thoughts. That's it. I'm not a teacher.

When an artist explains what he is doing, he usually has to do one of two things: either scrap what he has explained, or make his work fit in with the explanation.

Through art, you create your own world.

I trust the pictures to tell what I want to say.

I liked drawing and painting, because the only failure would be to listen to the doubters who wanted me to stop drawing and painting because 'you aren't going to make a living doing that.' I liked looking in art books at the work of painters.

Painting is a language which cannot be replaced by another language. I don't know what to say about what I paint, really.

Art is the way people see things, and I think it's great when individuals can find in fashion something they truly believe is artistic.

See, when I paint, it is an experience that, at its best, is transcending reality.

Knowing how to paint and to use one's colors rightly has not any connection with originality. This originality consists in properly expressing your own impressions.

Far from creating a new formalism, what these can yield is something far transcending surface values since they not only embody form as beauty, but also form in which intuitions or ideas or conjectures have taken visible substance.

I'm not trying to do conceptual art.

Fine art is knowledge made visible.

What I wish to show when I paint is the way I see things with my eyes and in my heart.

Sometimes I think that there's a fine line between impressionistic and messy.

My work should be seen as poetry.