Art Spiegelman Quotes

When you take something extremely broad, then it is not a work of expansion or work of compression. It's hard because you have to decide what to throw out.

There is no abstract art. You must always start with something. Afterward you can remove all traces of reality.

In some ways, I feel like the strength of animation is in its simplicity and caricature, and in reduction. It's like an Al Hirschfeld caricature, where he'll use, like, three lines, and he'll capture the likeness of someone so strongly that it looks more like them than a photograph. I think animation has that same power of reduction.

When you start with a portrait and search for a pure form, a clear volume, through successive eliminations, you arrive inevitably at the egg. Likewise, starting with the egg and following the same process in reverse, one finishes with the portrait.

I think most paintings are a record of the decisions that the artist made. I just perhaps make them a little clearer than some people have.

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

When you start with a portrait and try to find pure form by abstracting more and more, you must end up with an egg.

When one starts from a portrait and seeks by successive eliminations to find pure form... one inevitably ends up with an egg.

You take a painting, you have a white, virginal piece of canvas that is the world of purity, and then you put your imagery on it, and you try to bring it back to the original purity.

When you are creating your character there are a lot of questions and sometimes you doubt if you are making the right choices.

In many ways my paintings are about energy — both in how they are created and the image itself.

When you write - explode - fly apart - disintegrate! Then give time enough to think, cut, rework, and rewrite.

Take a step, breathe in the world, give it out again in story, poem, song, art.

I write a line and then I revise the line and then I write two lines and then I revise lines one and two and then I write one, two and three and I revise one and two and then I write seven and eight and then I see that should be line four and I continually work it over as I go.

A thing is not what you say it is or what you photograph it to be or what you paint it to be or what you sculpt it to be. Words, photographs, paintings, and sculptures are symbols of what you see, think, and feel things to be, but they are not the things themselves.

In mathematics the complicated things are reduced to simple things. So it is in painting.

I wake up around noon, light a cigarette, get a cup of coffee, sit in the bathtub for an hour and daydream, and I usually come up with some ideas... It's a very irresponsible life. The only decisions I make are about the notes I'm writing.

Art is about eliminating almost everything in order to focus on the thing that you need to talk about.

I always have a few ideas that are percolating, and then after I've finished a book and it's a year later, and things are sort of festering and things are disgusting in my house and I have to get back to work, whatever project I keep thinking about is the one I end up working on. Sort of a very simple process of elimination.

There is but one art, to omit.

I started doing 'figures', then, one day, all of a sudden, I started doing abstraction. And then I started doing both. But it was never really a conscious decision. It was simply a question of desire. In fact, I really prefer making figurative work, but the figure is difficult. So to work around the difficulty I take a break and paint abstractly. Which I really like, by the way, because it allows me to make beautiful paintings.

Painting, for me, when it really 'happens,' is as miraculous as any natural phenomenon - as say, a lettuce leaf. By 'happens,' I mean the painting in which the inner aspect of man and his outer aspects interlock.

I might write four lines or I might write twenty. I subtract and I add until I really hit something I want to do. You don't always whittle down, sometimes you whittle up.

With greater completeness and abstraction, I have attained a form filtered to its essentials.

Creative work is incredibly difficult, and that is where the tests lie. Ordinary professionalism and twenty years' experience can accomplish a lot, but it can't access the hidden places. That still needs what it always needs - a condition of complete simplicity, costing not less than everything.