Ben Nicholson Quotes

I have a completely romantic idea about making paintings, I guess.

Good art in general aspires to something, as a good painting aspires to something, almost spiritual or holy.

My aim in painting is to create pulsating, luminous, and open surfaces that emanate a mystic light, in accordance with my deepest insight into the experience of life and nature.

When a child who has been conceived in love is born to a man and a woman, the joy of that birth sings throughout the universe. The joy of writing or painting is much the same, and the insemination comes not from the artist himself but from his relationship with those he loves, with the whole world. All real art is, in its true sense, religious; it is a religious impulse; there is not such thing as a non-religious subject.

All poetry like every work of art proceeds from a swift vision of things.

I see for others... in order to put on canvas the sudden apparitions which come to me.

An odd contradiction, if the layman were correct in his unconscious assumption that an artist begins with reality and ends with art: the converse is true - to the degree that this dichotomy has any truth - the artist begins with art, and through it arrives at reality.

Everything's a film idea if this is what you do.I've always been secretly confident that I'd never run out of ideas,because I've never had any. I just live my life, see things theway I do, and I'm just looking for a notion to hang it all on.

A distinction is made between artists who work directly from nature and those who work purely from imagination. Neither if these methods should be preferred to the exclusion of the other. Often both are used in turn by the same man.

Kenneth Hari is a true artist and in my opinion a psychic. When he is painting you, he feels your heart and soul.

The particulars of life do not matter to the artist; they merely provide him with the opportunity to lay bare his genius.

Ideas emerge from plays, not the other way around.

Primarily I am a passionately religious man, and my novels must be written from the depth of my religious experience.

How could Michelangelo have seen his David in a block of marble? Man began to make images only because he discovered them nearly formed around him, already within reach. He saw them in a bone, in the bumps of a cave, in a piece of wood. One form suggested a woman to him, another a buffalo, still another the head of a monster.

Songwriters can’t explain. You get an idea and you don’t know where it’s come from. And if you’re lucky, you have a pencil or pen and can write it down.

I was interested in ideas, not merely visual products. I wanted to put painting once again at the service of the mind.

We are driven to confess that we actually care more for religion than we do for religious theories and ideas: and in merely making that distinction between religion and its doctrine-elements, have we not already relegated the latter to an external and subordinate position? Have we not asserted that "religion itself" has some other essence or constitution than mere idea or thought?

There's this whole idea that you've got the blues and you're going to write. Bullshit. When I feel really bad, all I want to do is sit in front of the TV with the remote control and check out.

do what only a true artist can do ... pounce upon the forgotten butterfly of revelation

The role of the painter . . . is to project that which sees itself in him.

I'll keep making records until I don't have more ideas for records.

To see itself through, music must have idea or magic. ... Music with neither dies young though rich.

I'll get an inspiration and start painting; then I'll forget everything, everything except how things used to be and how to paint it so people will know how we used to live.

The painting is finished when the idea has disappeared.

My paintings are reflections of my own inner mysteries... they all reflect my relationship to my steadiest of companions and muses - nature and animals.