Christian Nestell Bovee Quotes

I only understand realism.

I don't really consider myself an impressionist.

If you think about art, if you look at Rembrandt and Vermeer and Caravaggio, if you look at Turner and Constable and all the Impressionists and the Hudson River School, there's a tradition of light in art, especially painting.

To approach the spiritual in art, one will make as little use as possible of reality, because reality is opposed to the spiritual.

A school of art or of anything else is to be looked on as a single individual, who keeps talking to himself for a hundred years, and feels an extreme satisfaction with his own circle of favorite ideas, be they ever so silly.

There are many schools of painting. Why should there not be many schools of photographic art? There is hardly a right and a wrong in these matters, but there is truth, and that should form the basis of all works of art.

I wanted to be a painter, somewhere between Abstract Expressionism and Pop.

The modes of expression of men of genius differ as much as their souls, and it is impossible to say that in some among them, drawing and color are better or worse than in others.

I'm not an abstractionist completely.

I like the transience of Klimt paintings.

The mission of art is to represent nature not to imitate her.

Modern art is what happens when painters stop looking at girls and persuade themselves that they have a better idea.

I'm not trying to do conceptual art.

Entertainment is in art like color in pictures.

Impressionism; it is the birth of Light in painting.

I will always find even the worst paintings that attempt some kind of representation better than the best invented paintings.

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.

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

They certainly aren't connected with the old geometric art. My work isn't geometric in that sense.

I never use nature as a starting point. I never abstract from nature; I never consciously think of nature when I paint.

I don't think that my art isn't serious. I think the subjects are not serious, or my treatments of the subjects are not serious. But then, I'm also putting down subject, because like the abstract expressionists, I don't think the subject is important.

The thrill of a photo-realist painter is if you get really close to the painting, it looks just like a photograph. Whereas in my case, if you get close to my paintings, they totally fall apart - so I'm about as far from a photo-realist as it gets.

If I had gone to art college and everybody was being a conceptual artist, I probably would have wanted to be a portrait or landscape painter.

Duchamp is known for calling a thing art, rather than making it. A lot of that is picked up in pop art, too.

In art, as long as you have ideas and think, you are bound to deform nature. Art is deformation.