Larry Rivers Quotes

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

I'm not knocking conceptual art; it's another department, but it doesn't move me like painting.

Well, in any art there are a lot of technical things that you can get to like.

I'm not an Abstraction Expressionist, but I think dedication to paintings comes from an early interest in that work.

I've been working in sculpture and painting since 1920.

I try to consider each body of work on its own terms, discretely, so terms like 'sculpture' or 'photography', in their broad sense, don't really enter into my thinking.

I think we're in an age where artists really have an incredible range of materials at their command now. They can use almost anything from household items - Jackson Pollock used house paint - to, you know, advanced computer systems, to good old oil paint and acrylic paint.

Art is a continuum.

I paint. I love the visual arts.

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

I can draw and paint in many different styles, and use different mediums to create work.

A contemporary artist like Grayson Perry is brilliant partly because of his expert knowledge of art history, not despite it.

In the study of the fine arts, they mutually assist each other.

Warhol influenced me because of his writing. If I had never read his writings and interviews, I would never have understood his work.

Basically painting is total idiocy.

All I care about these days is painting — photography has never been more than a way into painting, a sort of instant drawing.

The fine arts thing at college was always too much for me to think about. What I was more involved in was being successful at arts school.

I had no idea what art was. There was one art class in high school, but it didn't make a big impression on me. Then I went to college and thought I'd become a writer.

Art never improves, but... the material of art is never quite the same.

I paint abstract expressions.

I looked at Rembrandt and Superman, Matisse and Bugs Bunny, and began to make my own pictures.

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

The artist himself is actually the subject in everything after, say, 1900. Eventually, art becomes so removed from the community that you have to know about the artist before you can even look at the painting, because there is a conceptual idea going on.

I'm an artist. And usually when I tell people I'm an artist, they just look at me and say, 'Do you paint?' or 'What kind of medium do you work in?'

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.