Lee Krasner Quotes

Art is limitation; the essence of every picture is the frame. If you draw a giraffe, you must draw him with a long neck. If in your bold creative way you hold yourself free to draw a giraffe with a short neck, you will really find that you are not free to draw a giraffe.

I don't try to force-feed it or put any things on the images until I'm making a painting. It's not photorealism. Photorealism's goal is to reproduce a photograph. The best photorealism can't beat a printer, and I have a really nice printer. I don't want to go blind doing what a printer can do.

Well, I have a very simple method of painting.

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.

One of two things is usually lacking in the so-called Philosophy of Art: either philosophy or art.

My core competency has really informed my painting. The roots of editing stem from classical paintings - classic painters intended to drive your eye from this conflict to that intrigue, ending with a caprice. That is a montage, that is editing. It became a flipbook in later generations.

What you do when you paint, you take a brush full of paint, get paint on the picture, and you have faith.

Art is concerned with the HOW and not the WHAT.

Pretend you are dancing or singing a picture.

I have been continuously aware that in painting, I am always dealing with... a relational structure. Which in turn makes permission 'to be abstract' no problem at all.

I don't paint women, I paint pictures. . . What I am after above all is expression. If in a portrait I put eyes, a nose, a mouth, there isn't much use; on the contrary it paralyses the imagination of the spectator, and obliges us to see the person in a certain way.

The most effective way of destroying art is the canonization of one given form. And one philosophy.

I had wrung impressionism dry and I finally came to the conclusion that I know neither how to paint nor how to draw.

Photography is Art and Art is Photography.

Painting demands an intelligent model.

As an artist I would like to eliminate the symbolic pretty much, for black is interesting not as a color but as a non-color and as the absence of color.

Modern pictures banish depiction for interfering with the workings of paint.

There is a better chance of getting an exciting painting from a laboured study with texture than from a fine drawing without it.

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

The word 'abstract' comes from the light tower of the philosophers. One of their spotlights that they have particularly focused on 'Art'. [Abstraction was] not so much what you could paint but rather what you could not paint. You could not paint a house or a tree or a mountain. It was then that subject matter came into existence as something you ought not have.

Theory has nothing to do with a work of art. Pictures which are interpretable, and which contain a meaning, are bad pictures. A picture presents itself as the Unmanageable, the Illogical, the Meaningless. It demonstrates the endless multiplicity of aspects; it takes away our certainty, because it deprives a thing of its meaning and its name. It shows us the thing in all the manifold significance and infinite variety that preclude the emergence of any single meaning and view.

The best spot painting you can have by me is one painted by Rachel.

The whole history of modern poetry is a continuous commentary on the short text of philosophy: every art should become science, and every science should become art; poetry and philosophy should be united.

It entered the visual vocabulary of photographers, painters and sculptors and focused on what pictures and words look like and what they can mean.

Art... does not take kindly to facts, is helpless to grapple with theories, and is killed outright by a sermon.