Richard Phillips Quotes

I'd like to write the way Matisse paints.

When you think of painting as painting it is rather absurd. The real world is before us - glorious sunlight and activity and fresh air, and high speed motor cars and television, all the animation - a world apart from a little square of canvas that you smear paint on.

Unlike the older, more humanly shaped arts, which begin with a seed and accumulate their form organically, photography clips its substance out of an actual continuum.

Painting is a nail to which I fasten my ideas.

If it weren't for how esoteric the art world likes to be, I would love actually to play the music in the shows, painting the music that influences me most.

The painter constructs, the photographer discloses.

A drawing is an autobiographical record of one's discovery of an event - either seen, remembered or imagined. A 'finished' work is an attempt to construct an event in itself.

The body, in 'La Belle Noiseuse,' was the source of the artist's creativity.

I've been fifty thousand times to the Louvre. I have copied everything in drawing, trying to understand.

I couldn't go into the haphazard drawing or the paintings, the splashing of paint. I wanted to go back to a completely dry drawing, a dry conception of art.

But I think that's a particular kind of experience involving a certain immediacy between you and the canvass, you and the particular kind of experience of that particular moment.

It doesn't make much difference how the paint is put on as long as something has been said. Technique is just a means of arriving at a statement.

Every picture has its own demands, and every picture stimulates something within you to tell it a certain way. I don't know what that is; I don't think too much about that.

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.

Ironically, my paintings don't photograph well.

Each drawing that I've done, I have found. Meaning, I see a plant I want to draw.

Painting is the aesthetic side of the object but it has never been original, has never been its own goal.

Painting is the frozen evidence of a performance.

The things that I paint are things that I know very well.

Art is a direct reflection of the life you live. What you experience comes out in your work.

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

I don't see myself as a photographer. I still see the photographs and collages as a resource for the painting.

My approach to portraiture is conceptual.

I'm using the grid as formation. I wanted a relationship between the paintings and videos so that way when you are looking at the videos there's a direct relationship to the paintings.

Painting is the intermediate somewhat between a thought and a thing.