Norman McLaren Quotes

Art is a continuum.

A contemporary artist like Grayson Perry is brilliant partly because of his expert knowledge of art history, not despite it.

Yes, you know sometimes, we started out thinking out how strange our painting was next to normal painting, which was anything expressionist. You forget that this has been thirty five years now and people don't look at it as if it were some kind of oddity.

People don't like contemporary art, but all art starts life as contemporary - I can't really see a difference.

From 1940 to the present, the art world - and particularly Los Angeles - has undergone a transformation not unlike the Italian Renaissance.

I have a fondness for making paintings that go beyond just having a conversation about art for art's sake or having a conversation about art history. I actually really enjoy looking at broader popular culture.

You're confusing product with process. Most people, when they criticize, whether they like it or hate it, they're talking about product. That's not art, that's the result of art. Art, to whatever degree we can get a handle on (I'm not sure that we really can) is a process. It begins in the heart and the mind with the eyes and hands.

In art there is no progress, only fluctuations of intensity.

Works of art imitate and provoke other works of art, the process is the source of art itself.

I had no idea what art was. There was one art class in high school, but it didn't make a big impression on me. Then I went to college and thought I'd become a writer.

Art never improves, but... the material of art is never quite the same.

Art begins in imitation and ends in innovation.

The strangeness will wear off and I think we will discover the deeper meanings in modern art.

In art there are only fast or slow developments. Essentially it is a matter of evolution, not revolution.

I have always said to young artists that scholastic training and the studying of art history are crucial to fully developing as an artist.

Whatever an artist's personal feelings are, as soon as an artist fills a certain area on the canvas or circumscribes it, he becomes historical. He acts from or upon other artists.

In the nineteenth century the more grandiose word inspiration began to replace the word idea in the arts.

The art world seems so much bigger than it was when I was growing up.

Unlike life, a work of art never gets taken for granted: it is always viewed against its precursors and predecessors.

The evolution of art is not only driven by artists, but by a conversation between the artists and the audience.

In the study of the fine arts, they mutually assist each other.

Theories of art carry the seeds of their own destruction.

I have never painted a recent picture.

Every work of art changes its predecessors.

Art comes from art: I remember going to the Matisse show and seeing how Matisse had taken one of his own paintings, worked from it and transformed it, and that had led on to the next one and the next.