Gerhard Richter Quotes

The thing about art for me is that you can go on theorising your work forever, because it's open to interpretation.

Art has nothing to do with clarity, does not dabble in the clear and does not make clear

My drawings inspire, and are not to be defined. They place us, as does music, in the ambiguous realm of the undetermined.

When I'm ready to make a photograph, I think I quite obviously see in my minds eye something that is not literally there in the true meaning of the word. I'm interested in something which is built up from within, rather than just extracted from without.

I paint what I see, not what a camera would see.

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

All good art, to me, is uncertainty.

Film is abstract, not definite. It is a dream.

There's no wrong way of doing art. It's an expression of the individual.

It's fun as a creator to make something that allows multiple interpretations.

Art is for stimulation, excitement, adventure.

When I put a green, it is not grass. When I put a blue, it is not the sky.

It would be quite amusing to preach a bit to all those people who for many years now have been looking at our paintings and either laughed or shook their heads reproachfully. They do not believe that these impressions, these instant sensations, could contain even the smallest grain of sanity. If a tree is red or blue, or a face is blue or green, they are sure that is insanity.

Painting is the most beautiful of all arts. In it, all sensations are condensed, at its aspect everyone may create romance at the will of his imagination, and at a glance have his soul invaded by the most profound memories, no efforts of memory, everything summed up in one moment. Complete art which sums up all the others and completes them.

What a funny thing painting is. The abstract painters always insist on their connection with the visible reality, while the so called figurative artists insist that what they really care about, is the abstract qualities of life.

Do not copy nature too much. Art is an abstraction.

A painting or sculpture not modelled on any real object is every bit as concrete and sensuous as a leaf or a stone... but it is an incomplete art which privileges the intellect to the detriment of the senses.

I paint what I think, not what I see.

Shut your eyes, wait, think of nothing. Now, open them ... one sees nothing but a great coloured undulation. What then? An irradiation and glory of colour. This is what a picture should give us ... an abyss in which the eye is lost, a secret germination, a coloured state of grace ... loose conciousness. Descend with the painter into the dim tangled roots of things, and rise again from them in colours, be steeped in the light of them.

Critic asks: 'And what, sir, is the subject matter of that painting?' - 'The subject matter, my dear good fellow, is the light.

Abstract painting is abstract. It confronts you.

Art is contemplation of the world in a state of grace and imaginatively reflecting that subjective understanding.

Abstract art as it is conceived at present is a game bequeathed to painting and sculpture by art history. One who accepts its premises must consent to limit his imagination to a depressing casuistry regarding the formal requirements of modernism.

I can't work without a model. I won't say I turn my back on nature ruthlessly in order to turn a study into a picture, arranging the colors, enlarging and simplifying; but in the matter of form I am too afraid of departing from the possible and the true.

These dog bones are just making art the way art should be made, without any overarching reference. Just for fun, if you can imagine that-art for fun.