Antoni Tapies Quotes

The sand swallows burst out of their scupper holes in the bluffs and out over the transparent drown of the water, back again to the white, to the brown, to the black, from moving to stock-still sand waves and water-worked woods and roots that hugged and twisted in the sun.

Even a friendly conversation which cannot be at any given moment be broken off voluntarily with complete arbitrariness has something illiberal about it. An artist, however, who is able and wants to express himself completely, who keeps nothing to himself and would wish to say everything he knows, is very much to be pitied.

In this world, artists are joyous. Unpredictability is the life of their paintings, their music, their novels. They delight in events not forecasted, happenings without explanation, retrospective.

If you go to a master to study and learn the techniques, you diligently follow all the instructions the master puts upon you. But then comes the time for using the rules in your own way and not being bound by them....You can actually forget the rules because they have been assimilated. You are an artist. Your own innocence now is of one who has become an artist, who has been, as it were, transmuted.... You can't have creativity unless you leave behind the bounded, the fixed, all the rules.

The big tradition, I think, is unity. And I have that in mind; and with that, you know, you could break all the traditions- all the other so-called rules, because they are stylistic.. and most are not true. As long as the marks are related to one another, there is unity. Unity in the work itself depends on unity of the artist's vision.

Every artist, writers included, have an ethics and an aesthetics, whether they can formulate them or not. I happen to think that it is good to be able to formulate - it is good to know what you are doing and to be able to talk about it.

So the problem for the poetic artist or the photographer is the common problem of continuous attentiveness, continuous attempts to notice what he is noticing, continuous alertness to catch himself thinking or seeing, devotional attentiveness to the world he's moving through.

Taste! It doesn't exist. An artist makes beautiful things without being aware of it.

A painter must not only be of necessity an imitator of the works of nature... but he must be as necessarily an imitator of the works of other painters. This appears more humiliating, but is equally true; and no man can be an artist, whatever he may suppose, upon any other terms.

When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn't really do it, they just saw something.

If mere mechanical efficiency can make everyone a martial artist, then all is well. Unfortunately, combat, like freedom, is something that can not be preconceived.

I shall set forth for somewhere, I shall make the reckless choice Some say when they are in voice And tossing so as to scare The white clouds over them on, I shall have less to say, But I shall be none.

I was born in Suzhou, a city not very far from Shanghai. It's a very interesting town - there is a long artist's tradition there, especially during the Ming and Ching dynasties, which produced many, many scholars and painters and so forth. That's where my family lived for 600, 700 years.

Whenever serious art loses track of its roots in the vernacular, then it begins to atrophy.

A good traveler has no fixed plans and is not intent upon arriving. A good artist lets his intuition lead him wherever it wants. A good scientist has freed himself of concepts and keeps his mind open to what is.

Immortality is a by-product of good work. Masterpieces are not for artists, they're for critics. Critics can't even make music by rubbing their back legs together. My message to the world is 'Let's swing, sing, shout, make noise! Let's not mimic death before our time comes! Let's be wet and noisy!'

In the attacks on the old ways of doing things on word in particular came into currency. That word was "kitsch." Once introduced, the word stuck. Whatever you do, it musn't be kitsch. This became the first precept of the modernist artist in every medium.

Sometimes I write songs that just come out in a pop format because I grew up on melody and these amazing artists during the 80s. It's my tradition and it's something that I can't really control.

A good martial artist does not become tense, but ready. Not thinking, yet not dreaming. Ready for whatever may come. When the opponent expands, I contract; and when he contracts, I expand. And when there is an opportunity, "I" do not hit, "it" hits all by itself.

I put out a lot of different kinds of material, and maybe people read that as egotistical. Or maybe, since a lot of it does involve some aspect of me, they find it self-aggrandizing. But there’s a long tradition of artists using themselves. Look, I know I’m not perfect. And, who knows, maybe a part of it has to do with self-obsession. But it’s also about using this weird thing that is a public persona as raw material for creative projects.

It's such a phenomenon for a hip-hop artist to fully embrace his Christian roots and his faith. And that becomes something that people almost need you to justify.

Without total freedom, every perception, every objective regard, is twisted. It is only the man who is totally free that can look and understand immediately. Freedom implies really, doesn't it, the total emptying of the mind. To completely empty the whole content of the mind — that is real freedom.

I want to be able to do whatever I feel like doing and not worry about anything. Even when I was a kid, the only contemporary artist I listened to was Cyndi Lauper.

Artists tend to be beyond embarrassment the way little children tend to be beyond embarrassment.

The interesting thing about this is I don't know what my vision [ in Salome the play and Salomaybe] is yet about. I'm sensing something and I'm going along with it. It reminds me of a painting, the way Jackson Pollack painted - Jackson Pollack, the great, great artist.