Diego Rivera Quotes

The song "This Is Not Surreal," was inspired by a painter I love, Frida Kahlo. She really did suffer for her art. She speaks to me. She was brutally honest in her work. At that time in fine art, you really didn't see many female artists expressing that. She was such a strong female presence, and I really look up to her. She had a lot of physical pain.

The art of Frida Kahlo is a ribbon around a bomb.

You'll need to suffer to make any real art.

Fine art is the only teacher except torture.

Art is really a battle.

I think that a lot of artists have succeeded in making what I might call "curator's art." Everybody's being accepted, and I always want to say, "Really? That's what you've come for? To make art that looks a lot like somebody else's art?" If I am thinking of somebody else's art in front of your art, that's a problem.

I'm not videotaping my life, but in a way I am trying to put certain things about myself on canvas.

You think my paintings are calm, like windows in some cathedral? You should look again. I'm the most violent of all the American painters. Behind those colours there hides the final cataclysm.

Every artist is a cannibal/every poet is a thief/all kill for inspiration/and then sing about the grief.

Abstract expressionism was the first American art that was filled with anger as well as beauty.

But perhaps my art is the art of a lunatic, I thought, mere glittering quicksilver, a blue soul breaking in upon my pictures.

grievance does not make for great art.

In Utero is a testament to the artistic vision of Kurt Cobain. It's kind of a weird record, and it's strangely beautiful at the same time. And if you look at Kurt's paintings and his drawings - he even did a sculpture for me - it's a rising, tortured-spirit person. It's kind of weird. It's done well, but it's like what Dave was saying about having your own sound. Kurt was a great songwriter. He knew he had a good ear for a hook [and was] a great singer, great guitar player, and In Utero is a good representation of what he liked in art and how he expressed himself.

The object, which is back of every true work of art, is the attainment of a state of being, a state of high functioning, a more than ordinary moment of existence. In such moments activity is inevitable, and whether this activity is with brush, pen, chisel, or tongue, its result is but a by-product of the state, a trace, the footprint of the state.

I think that for thousands of years people have made the observation that there are certain kinds of extreme depressive states that seem to be more likely to produce philosophers, people in the arts, unusually brilliant scientists.

I see the canvas and I begin... It's a necessary evil to get into the work, and it's pretty marvelous to be able to get out of it.

I'm interested in pressure, I'm interested in duress. All the great works of art, or film or literature, in my opinion, have elements of those in them.

Only poetry or madness could do justice to the noises.

When art seems to be empty of meaning, as no doubt some of the abstract painting of our own day actually does seem, what the painting says, indeed what the artist is shrieking at the top of his voice, is that life has become empty of all rational content and coherence, and that, in times like these, is far from a meaningless statement.

A canvas is an arena in which to act.

I have always been aware of different movements and directions in art. But, in general, I'm always bored by any kind of generalization when it comes to artists. I think that there are just single individuals, who are valuable, and they work outside of any group.

The painter makes real to others his innermost feelings about all that he cares for. A secret becomes known to everyone who views the picture through the intensity with which it is felt.

I sense a scream passing through nature. I painted ... the clouds as actual blood. The colour shrieked.

Art is a person's private vision expressed in aesthetic forms.

He didn't see me looking at him, but I could tell the ceremony was having the same effect on him. He was enraptured. It was a rare and sweet look for him, reminding me of the tortured artist that lived beneath the sarcasm. I liked that about Adrian—not the tortured part, but the way he could feel so deeply and then transform those emotions into art.