Lillian Hellman Quotes

Formerly pictures used to move towards completion in progressive stages. Each day would bring something new. A picture was a sum of additions. With me, picture is a sum of destructions. I do a picture, then I destroy it. But in the long run nothing is lost; the red that I took away from one place turns up somewhere else.

All art is dependent on technology because it's a human endeavour, so even when you're using charcoal on a wall or designed the proscenium arch, that's technology.

We are all hungry and thirsty for concrete images. Abstract art will have been good for one thing: to restore its exact virginity to figurative art.

Art is a continuum.

People don't like contemporary art, but all art starts life as contemporary - I can't really see a difference.

I have no fear of making changes, destroying the image, etc., because the painting has a life of its own.

In my art, I deconstruct and then I reconstruct, so visual perception is one of my primary interests.

I want to make work that reflects different times and processes.

Art is in the process of redefining our relationships to each other ... The creative minds are bubbling, bubbling, and I know the soup that's coming up next time is going to feed a lot more of us.

Like a dog, a playwright lives in an eternal present and a play is never closed.

I arrange my subject as I want it, then I go ahead and paint it, like a child.

Sometimes I scrape off a lot. You have on the floor, like cow dung in the field, this big glob of paint... and it's just a lot of inert matter, inert paint. Then I look back at the canvas, and it's not inert - it's active, moving and living.

I build a painting by putting little marks together-some look like hot dogs, some like doughnuts.

As a child growing up among artists I learned to think of a picture not as a finished product exposed for the admiration of the virtuosi, but as the visible record, lying about the house, of an attempt to solve a definite problem in painting.

The greatest work of an artist is the history of a painting.

We need new art. Old art cannot do that. It can do lots of other things, and of course humanity hasn't changed that much in the last thousand or two thousand years.So that the old Greek dramas are still at the very heart, core, of human experience, but still we need new stuff.

The world of art is not a world of immortality but of metamorphosis.

Just as a child is really a thing that wants to become a man, so is the poem an object of nature that wants to become an object ofart.

He was an Afghan Hound name Kabul. Since him I have had other Afghan Hounds.... Perhaps I am looking for his ghost. He is the only one that I sometimes think about. Often, if he comes in to my mind when I am working, it alters what I do. The nose on the face I am drawing gets longer and sharper. The hair of the woman I am sketching gets longer and fluffy, resting against her cheeks like his ears rested against his head.

In art there is no progress, only fluctuations of intensity.

How can you say one style is better than another? You ought to be able to be an Abstract Expressionist next week, or a Pop artist, or a realist, without feeling you've given up something.. I think that would be so great, to be able to change styles. And I think that's what's is going to happen, that's going to be the whole new scene.

A painter was asked why, since he made such beautiful figures, which were but dead things, his children were so ugly; to which the painter replied that he made his pictures by day, and his children by night.

When I paint, the Sea Roars Others Splash about in the bath

Making art is a rite of initiation. People change their souls.

I think it was Henry Moore who was asked where he got his ideas for his sculptures, and he said something like, "I continue to do as an adult the things I did as a child." I think that's what art is about.