Claes Oldenburg Quotes

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

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.

If you scratch a great photograph, you find two things; a painting and a photograph.

If you want to paint the inner life, you paint it from the exterior. From the exterior, you breathe the inner life into your painting.

Painting is the passage from the chaos of the emotions to the order of the possible.

This truth must be recognized as a dogma and assume the validity of an axiom in the general understanding of painting.

Painting is a nail to which I fasten my ideas.

To paint is a possessing rather than a picturing.

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.

I think a painting is more like the real world if it's made out the real world.

Art is the concrete representation of our most subtle feelings.

Painting is the frozen evidence of a performance.

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

I try and take the photographs and paintings and make them real. And the real video we treat as paintings. We flip the reality.

I think all art - if it's good - is a result of really trying to create something that you can't put into words. Where language ends is where good art begins.

Art - be it painting, sculpture, music - they are all creations, they are creative acts. I consider a film, with everything that is involved in it, an art.

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

Once my paintings are complete, the model no longer lives in the painting as themselves. I see something bigger, more symbolic - an archetype.

I think that there is not really a difference between a 'Peanuts' and a beautiful Renaissance painting. There is something very romantic in the 'Peanuts' - it's at the same level of a novel or a Jane Austen story or a beautiful embroidered rose fabric. It is a piece of romanticism.

Writing is an art, just like any other creative exercise - painting a picture, singing a song or dancing. It is an expression of your feelings.

Love is art, not truth. It’s like painting scenery.

Painting demands an intelligent model.

People who are making films today are too concerned with mechanics - technical things instead of feeling.

All I care about these days is painting — photography has never been more than a way into painting, a sort of instant drawing.

I think, if one is a painter, all you experience does come out when you’re painting.