Alberto Giacometti Quotes

When you read Chekhov, everything has an even gray tone. When you read 'Family Life', everything has an even white tone. It is almost like when you paint on paper, and you can see the paper through the paint.

I work in three shades of black.

It is the bareness of drawing that I like. The act of drawing is what locates, suggests, discovers. At times it seems enough to draw, without the distractions of color and mass. Yet it is an old ambition to make drawing and painting one.

My characters have undergone the same process of simplification as the colors. Now that they have been simplified, they appear more human and alive than if they had been represented in all their details.

At first I had some idea that the absence of color made the work more physical. Early on I was very involved with the notion of the painting as an object and tended to attack that idea from different directions.

I gravitate towards monochromes. I always sort of either wear white or black or cream. I really like wearing colorful things as well, but I'm a sucker for cream-colored.

In some ways, I feel like the strength of animation is in its simplicity and caricature, and in reduction. It's like an Al Hirschfeld caricature, where he'll use, like, three lines, and he'll capture the likeness of someone so strongly that it looks more like them than a photograph. I think animation has that same power of reduction.

The colors live a remarkable life of their own after they have been applied to the canvas.

Which is probably the reason why I work exclusively in black and white... to highlight that contrast.

White paint is my marble.

I paint on the ground. I paint with sticks, with big paint cans, and whatever else falls in it. Basically, what I'm doing is capturing unbridled emotion and putting it on canvas. It's like capturing lightning in a bottle.

Painting picture by picture, I followed the impressions my eye took in at heightened moments. I painted only memories, adding nothing, no details that I did not see. Hence the simplicity of the paintings, their emptiness.

I would say I've always lived creativity, but now I - I do it with an intention that's got a completely different power.

I probably use more grays than any other artist in the history of art.

An artist's initial broad stroke is always most impactful, and obsessively adding layer upon layer of paint to fill in details often diminishes the painting's aura. When an aura is lost, it is impossible to get back.

I love white, I love black. For me, sometimes, it's nice to play with colors, but when you're too busy to think and you've got so much in your mind, sometimes all you need is a bare uniform.

I just make my music. It's not too complicated.

I'm never trying to make something esoteric; it just happens.

When one starts from a portrait and seeks by successive eliminations to find pure form... one inevitably ends up with an egg.

I drew pictures rapidly and with few lines, because I had to write most of the pieces, too, and couldn't monkey long with the drawings. The divine urge was no higher than that.

I do not plan any painting, but begin with layers of textures and colors. As I layer the colors, something is suggested to me from within, and that is how it evolves.

The higher processes are all processes of simplification. The novelist must learn to write, and then he must unlearn it; just as the modern painter learns to draw, and then learns when utterly to disregard his accomplishment, when to subordinate it to a higher and truer effect.

Why carve? It's a better sculpture that way. I'll never improve the block. So I just started using uncarved blocks.

No color will ever be brighter for me than black and white.

My tendency towards bareness and simplification has been practiced in three fields: modeling, colors, and the figuration of the personages.