Martin Filler Quotes

In painting, the most brilliant colors, spread at random and without design, will give far less pleasure than the simplest outline of a figure.

Remember that a painting - before it is a battle horse, a nude model, or some anecdote - is essentially a flat surface covered with colours assembled in a certain order.

The only thing I can say is consistent in all my paintings is vivid color.

What has stayed true all the way through my work is my composition, I hope, and my sense of color.

I influenced the BG style by not being able to draw perspective. The BG artists developed cool graphic painting styles to make my bad backgrounds look like they were that way on purpose.

It is only after years of preparation that the young artist should touch color - not color used descriptively, that is, but as a means of personal expression.

My pictures are made up of four or five colors that collide with one another.

I paint abstract expressions.

When I'm painting the picture, I'm really painting a picture. I may have a flat-footed technique, or something like that, but still, to me, the thrill, or the meat of the thing, is the actual painting. I don't get any thrill out of laying it out.

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

I try to apply colors like words that shape poems, like notes that shape music.

In common with Michelangelo and Rembrandt I am more interested in the line, its rise and fall, than in color.

I'm a pointillist, just working my tiny little piece of the canvas. I'm not so good at perspective.

I use about 20 different colours to retain the luminance in my work.

The way I paint is similar to rock in that you don't stand around and say, 'Gee, what are they talking about?' Rock is simple, blunt, colorful. Same with my paintings. You don't stand back and wonder what it is. That's Jim Morrison, that's a panda, that's a scene on the West Coast. It's not abstract.

I really admire paintings that look like an actual snapshot - I think that's just extraordinary.

I try to do a lot of asymmetrical, triangular compositions - I find those work really well for comic book covers in that portrait mode, and I don't always see that in other artists.

To paint well, I need to be enraptured by my subjects.

From childhood my mother had me examining Robert Mapplethorpe's style and Egon Schiele's framing - that's what modelling is about.

The first time I worked with colors was by making these mosaics of Pantone swatches. They end up being very large pictures, and I photographed with a very large camera - an 8x10 camera. So you can see the surface of every single swatch - like in this picture of Chuck Close. And you have to walk very far to be able to see it.

Most of the power of painting comes through the manipulation of space... but I don't understand that.

A photographer must choose a palette as painters choose theirs.

All my paintings are usually done in drawing form, very small. I make notations in drawings first, and then I make a collage for color. But drawing is always my notation.

Painting is seen as picture making, the making of an art object, something that can stand on its own.

In painting, you don't have to go through a process of opinion; it speaks directly, and either it works, or it doesn't.