Peter Sotos Quotes

I made one untitled piece.

I was interested in ideas, not merely visual products. I wanted to put painting once again at the service of the mind.

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.

I think I've always been afraid of painting, really. Right from the beginning. All my paintings are about painting without a painter. Like a kind of mechanical form of painting.

I felt the most intense pleasure in piercing the stone in order to make an abstract form and space; quite a different sensation from that of doing it for the purpose of realism.

The moment of creative impulse is what an artist gives you. You look at a Pollock, and it can't give you the tools to do a painting like that yourself, but in doing the work, Pollock shares with you the moment of creative impulse that drove him to do that work.

I'm a contemporary artist and I show in art galleries and museums. I show a number of photographs and films, but I also make television programs, books and some appetizing, all with the same concept.

Art is that which comes to a man, and stands between himself and an implacable witness: the work.

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.

What I am really concerned about is what art is supposed to be - and can become.

I'll take anything and slap it on a canvas.

Wolfgang Tillman's stunning large-scale pictures, being shown for the first time, were so offhand I failed to see them as art.

'Art or anti-art?' was the question I asked when I returned from Munich in 1912 and decided to abandon pure painting or painting for its own sake. I thought of introducing elements alien to painting as the only way out of a pictorial and chromatic dead end.

The point of painting is not really deception or imitation.

The other great development has been in photography, but that too was influenced by Conceptual art.

I'm not an abstract artist; I leave that to others. To me, abstract art ended with Kazimir Malevich's 'Black Square.' To continue it is senseless.

If I paint something, I don't want to have to explain what it is.

Yes, I did, I mean I painted er, in a kind of abstract expressionist way, because of course that was exciting.

My work is not about paint. It's about paint at the service of something else. It is not about gooey, chest-beating, macho '50s abstraction that allows paint to sit up on the surface as subject matter about paint.

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.

Abstract art places a new world, which on the surface has nothing to do with 'reality,' next to the 'real' world.

Art is partly communication, but only partly. The rest is discovery.

I was trying. I was crawling. I was coming into myself. I was trying to in some ways get beyond - what is the word that I'm looking for? - metaphorical language in painting, and to create something that was more indexical. And what I mean by that is that when you go to the library there's an index card that refers to a book that's actual and real in the world. So that index relates to something real.

I've had a period of drawing on canvas in black - with some of my early images coming thru -, think the non-objectivists will find them disturbing - and the kids who think it simple to splash a 'Pollock' out.

I've never been a representational artist at all. Most artists have been representational. That's when you discover yourself.