Julie Mehretu Quotes

I'm not knocking conceptual art; it's another department, but it doesn't move me like painting.

I sometimes am challenged to imagine where the timbre of art should be. Should it be about objects that point to this current moment, or how objects are related to ideas of this current moment?

Some painters transform the sun into a yellow spot, others transform a yellow spot into the sun.

However, in modern conceptual frameworks there is a more sophisticated view. I would say that the act of music exists in several worlds simultaneously.

There is no work of art that has ever been made that is absolutely truthful about life.

Painting (like poetry) chooses from universals what is most apposite. It brings together, in a single imaginary being, circumstances and characteristics which occur in nature in many different persons.

Art evokes emotion. It doesn't have to be a thing of beauty.

You don't eat a painting of an apple; you don't find it morally good. Instead, it tells you something strange about apples in themselves.

When you walk past a painting in a museum, if it doesn't make you feel something, then it's probably a failure.

If a symbol should be discovered in a painting of mine, it was not my intention. It is a result I did not seek. It is something that may be found afterwards, and which can be interpreted according to taste.

Every painted image of something is also about the absence of the real thing. All painting is about the presence of absence.

If a work of art is to explore new environments, it is not to be regarded as a blueprint but rather as a form of action-painting.

That should be something that an artist can respond to as well in terms of a painting.

Painting is a strange business.

[T]he visibility of styles is itself a product of historical consciousness. ... The very notion of "style" needs to be approached historically. Awareness of style as a problematic and isolable element in a work of art has emerged in the audience for art only at certain historical moments - as a front behind which other issues, ultimately ethical and political, are being debated.

My paintings are not meant to be tasted.

My paintings seem to make the strongest impression on people who are, well, who are crazy.

Before you go further, let me tell you what a poem brings, first, you must know the secret, there is no poem to speak of, it is a way to attain a life without boundaries.

Without love there is no art. When the artist is playing beautifully there is no 'me; there is love and beauty, and this is art. This is skill in action.

Painting stems from a sense of organisation, the sensed positions of contrasts. Not that it is about this.

When I looked at the painting I felt the same convergence on a single point: a flickering sun-struck instance that existed now and forever. Only occasionally did I notice the chain on the finch's ankle, or think what a cruel life for a little living creature - fluttering briefly, forced always to land in the same hopeless place.

If you are close to it, a big painting is just a feeling around you, that's all.

The sophisticated concern about art sinks before a spontaneous love of reality, and I thank the photograph for being so transparent a vehicle for things.

A picture is the expression of an impression

In general, my paintings are multifocal. You can't call it unfocused space, but not being fixed to a single focus is very much of our time.