F. Sionil Jose Quotes

I came down successfully through Picasso and Braque, down through Pollock, I guess, but I began to stop at Franz Kline and the Abstractionists. I like their design, brilliant design, marvelous color layers. But I don't find any human content there. I'm from an old school, and painting has to have human content for me.

Painting will have to deal more fully and less obliquely with life and nature's phenomena before it can again become great.

It's not about perfection. What's a perfect painting? What's interesting about a perfect painting?

Things like anatomy and drawing and design and color had pretty much been drop-kicked out of the curriculum in the '70s, when I was studying art, in favor of abstraction and minimalism.

I only understand realism.

What is bad painting? Picabia made some deliberately bad paintings, but they were by him, so great in a way.

I create for artistic intent only and do everything from life.

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

I have never subscribed to the Dirty Pallet school of painting.

Art is anything you can get away with.

I don't know why I paint what I paint. I think it comes out - it's kind of my subconscious or something.

It's clever, but is it Art?

He drove his kind of realism at me so hard I bounced right into nonobjective painting.

I carry out my work thus: I never use models or nature for the figure, drapery or anything else.

At that point it certainly would be called abstract. That is to say, you had a model and there'd be one or two or three people there drawing the model but otherwise you had abstractions all around the room, even though the model was in front of you.

If Art relates itself to an Object, it becomes descriptive, divisionist, literary.

There is no abstract art. You must always start with something. Afterward you can remove all traces of reality.

People understand what art is supposed to look like, and so it's easy to make something that looks like art but isn't - especially in an abstract form.

It is a widely accepted notion among painters that it does not matter what one paints as long as it is well painted. This is the essence of academicism.

So I try to re-invent my own eye every time I tackle a new subject. But it's hard, because everybody has style. You can't help it.

The real sustains the same relation to the ideal that a stone does to a statue - or that paint does to a painting. Realism degrades and impoverishes.

An artist is somebody who produces things that people don't need to have.

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.

A painting has to be beautiful. Even in its grotesqueness.

The key to good art is to make something that means something to you.