Anthony Caro Quotes

I try to make pieces that are durable. One of the reasons that I work in steel is durability.

I don't work from drawings and colour sketches into a final painting. Painting, I think, today - the more immediate, the more direct - the greater the possibilities of making a direct - of making a statement.

Abstract expression is so solid, so successful and recognizable, but there's a mystery about the artists that goes into it, a fetishism about the artists themselves and who they were.

The only hope I had was when (in his youth)I saw one day a photograph of a sculpture by Wilhelm Lehmbruck, a German sculptor of expressionistic style. This was perhaps the only example, Lehmbruck, between my sixteenth to nineteenth years in which I saw a possibility for art to be principally of interest to innovate some things, instead of writing a very boring, naturalistic repetition of what is already done by nature.

Abstract painting is abstract. It confronts you.

I think that one of the things that influences me most as a composer is to what extent I can deconstruct and reconstruct the material that I'm working with.

I think of a piece, and then people who are competent fabricate it. But lately I've started finger painting, which probably should be a joke but isn't!

My advice to new artists is to embrace a broader concept of timelessness than vintage or retro.

I work pretty quickly. I'd probably draw somebody once or twice in pencil, then just go to ink. Not really care too much about it, and it just kind of worked out.

The big shock of my life was Abstract Expressionism - Pollock, de Kooning, those guys. It changed my work. I was an academically trained student, and suddenly you could pour paint, smear it on, broom it on!

I create art. It's kinda abstract.

Filmmakers are going to make films, just like painters are going to paint.

The paintings by Van Gough and Chagall had a big influence on me.

I wanted to paint in a folk-artist-y way. My heroes were Van Gogh, Gauguin, Matisse, and Rembrandt. I think Picasso is about as a modern as I got. But I incorporated things that they rejected as well as movements that happened later.

My paintings are certainly nonobjective. They're just horizontal lines.

Most painting in the European tradition was painting the mask. Modern art rejected all that. Our subject matter was the person behind the mask.

If I could have any artist's work on my sitting room wall it would probably be by Van Gogh or Picasso.

My first influence obviously was Picasso.

Painter after painter, since the beginning of the century, has tended toward abstraction. First, the Impressionists simplified the landscape in terms of color, and then the Fauves simplified it again by adding distortion, which, for some reason, is a characteristic of our century.

Impressionism; it is the birth of Light in painting.

I'll take anything and slap it on a canvas.

Building a house from scratch in the middle of a field is a bit like building a prototype car. As with all prototypes, if you're building a car you usually have the luxury of producing several prototypes before you arrive at the production line version - so the opportunity for changing things is quite rich.

To find a form that accommodates the mess, that is the task of the artist now.

You begin with the possibilities of the material.

Yes, I did, I mean I painted er, in a kind of abstract expressionist way, because of course that was exciting.