Toyin Odutola Quotes

I do remember at my very first opening in 1979 another artist coming up to me, and he was haranguing me, saying, "Did you really intend for these things to be so dumb? You just put it there and took a picture of it." He wouldn't let it go. So that's what made me think about the dumbness aspect more.

It is not an aesthetic misstep to make the viewer aware of the paint and the painter's hand. Such an empathetic awareness lies at the heart of aesthetic appreciation.

I suppose I consider my work a kind of picture making.

I think it was Roger Fry who first coined what he took to be a final definition of a work of art, whether it was a painting, building, poem or Hepplewhite chair. He said that the best works of art are finished products that preserve 'a valuable state of mind'.

You're confusing product with process. Most people, when they criticize, whether they like it or hate it, they're talking about product. That's not art, that's the result of art. Art, to whatever degree we can get a handle on (I'm not sure that we really can) is a process. It begins in the heart and the mind with the eyes and hands.

An artist is a man who digests his own subjective impressions and knows how to find a general objective meaning in them, and how to express them in a convincing form.

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.

I make pictures and someone comes in and calls it art.

It is not your paintings I like, it is your painting.

To paint is a possessing rather than a picturing.

By painting colors and lines and forms seen in quickened mood I was seeking to make this mood vibrate as a phonograph does. This was the origin of the paintings in The Frieze of Life.

When I draw a character, very often as I'm doing a face, my face mirrors the expression.

Art is the most beautiful of all lies.

I think most paintings are a record of the decisions that the artist made. I just perhaps make them a little clearer than some people have.

In my art, I deconstruct and then I reconstruct, so visual perception is one of my primary interests.

Part of the joy of looking at art is getting in sync in some ways with the decision-making process that the artist used and the record that's embedded in the work.

I tend to get very suspicious of anything that thinks it's art while it's being created.

As an artist, you've got to see the mess. That's what we do. We get a human being, and it's like putting together a puzzle. And the puzzle has got to be a mixture, a multifaceted mixture of human emotions, and not all of it is going to be pretty.

Art is concerned with the HOW and not the WHAT.

Drawing is feeling. Color is an act of reason.

It was only after I had been out of the art school that I actually copied a small Seurat, and I copied it in order to follow his thought, because if you do copy an artist, and you have a close feeling for him, in fact that you need to know more about his work, there is no better way than actually to copy, because you get very close indeed to how somebody thinks.

If drawing belongs to the world of spirit and color to that of the senses, you must draw first to cultivate the spirit.

The frame is the reward of the artist.

With an artist no sane man quarrels, any more than with the colour of a child's eyes.

I pay tribute to the writing always. The writer is a creative artist and the director is an interpretive artist and the actors are interpretive. You take zero and make it into something, that's always amazing to me.