Agnes Martin Quotes

All my work comes from perceiving. I kept seeing things that were brooding in me. I'm not a geometric artist.

A picture is the expression of an impression. If the beautiful were not in us, how would we ever recognize it?

I am interested in relating the things we see with the things we see with our eyes closed.

I often told the fanatics of realism that there is no such thing as realism in art: it only exists in the mind of the observer. Art is a symbol, a thing conjuring up reality in our mental image. That is why I don't see any contradiction between abstract and figurative art either.

The thing is that when you don't carry a camera, that's when you see pictures in particular, or at least that's when you think you see pictures in particular. When you do carry it, if you do see one on the occasion that you do, you can take it.

Insight is the first condition of Art.

The job of the artist is always to deepen the mystery.

Close your bodily eye, that you may see your picture first with the eye of the spirit. Then bring to light what you have seen in the darkness, that its effect may work back, from without to within.

Love to his soul gave eyes; he knew things are not as they seem. The dream is his real life; the world around him is the dream.

I did go there later, but I hadn't been there before I wrote the book. Sometimes I feel like the imagined can feel more real than the real?

To regard the imagination as metaphysics is to think of it as part of life, and to think of it as part of life is to realize the extent of artifice. We live in the mind.

A blind man can make art if what is in his mind can be passed to another mind in some tangible form.

While I recognize the necessity for a basis of observed reality... true art lies in a reality that is felt.

The painter should not paint what he sees, but what will be seen.

The paradox of reality is that no image is as compelling as the one which exists only in the mind's eye.

My art originates from hallucinations only I can see. I translate the hallucinations and obsessional images that plague me into sculptures and paintings.

The painting is not on a surface, but on a plane which is imagined. It moves in a mind. It is not there physically at all. It is an illusion, a piece of magic, so that what you see is not what you see.

The soul never thinks without a picture.

Poetry should... should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance.

Viewing abstract art requires more imagination. The result is more intense involvement of the viewer—more pleasurable.

Everyone reads the same words in a book but has a very clear picture of their own.

Every painting is always two paintings: The one you see, and the one you remember.

We are all visionaries, and what we see is our soul in things.

The inner eye does not see upon command.

I do not paint what I see, but what I saw.