Robert G. Ingersoll Quotes

Painting is the representation of visible forms. The essence of realism is its negation of the ideal.

The reason I don't like realist, photorealist, neorealist, or whatever, is that I am as interested in the artificial as I am in the real.

Of course the illusion of art is to make one believe that great literature is very close to life, but exactly the opposite is true. Life is amorphous, literature is formal.

I only understand realism.

I've always been drawn to artists who paint for the everyday person. I love the American illustrators.

The ideal and the beautiful are identical; the ideal corresponds to the idea, and beauty to form; hence idea and substance are cognate.

In the visual arts, particularly painting, I distrust all those abstractions, those artificial constructions. I have a very simple way of judging them: if I can do them, they are not art.

Pop Art looks out into the world. It doesn't look like a painting of something, it looks like the thing itself.

I think a painting is more like the real world if it's made out the real world.

To move the picture into our surroundings and give it real existence has been my ideal since I came to abstract painting.

From the age of six I wanted to be an artist. At that point I meant a painter, but it turned out what I really meant was I was someone who was very interested in watching the world and making copies of it.

I love many realists but very strongly resist the notion that realism presents a less stylized, more authentic version of the world.

I am not interested in representing reality. Actually, I am interested in representing reality, but that doesn't mean a naturalistic approach, which I think is kind of impossible.

I see no reason for painting anything that can be put into any other form as well.

Sculpture is more than painting. It is greater To raise the dead to life than to create Phantoms that seem to live.

. . .nature indifferently copied is far superior to the best idealities.

Romantic art deals with the exception and with the individual. Good people, belonging as they do to the normal, and so, commonplace type, are artistically uninteresting.

A copy of the universe is not what is required of art; one of the damned things is ample.

Fiction is like a spider's web, attached ever so slightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners. Often the attachment is scarcely perceptible.

I desire you would use all your skill to paint my picture truly like me, and not flatter me at all; but remark all these roughnesses, pimples, warts, and everything as you see me, otherwise I will never pay a farthing for it.

Not all paintings are abstract; they're not all Jackson Pollock. There's value in a photograph of a man alone on a boat at sea, and there is value in painting of a man alone on a boat at sea. In the painting, the painting has more freedom to express an idea, more latitude in being able to elicit certain emotion.

A painting has to be beautiful. Even in its grotesqueness.

I hope my pieces have an authenticity to them, but my job is to filter the world and tell a story, not to define and recreate exactly what's going on.

Just because someone said painting is dead doesn't mean that it's a fact or the truth - painting is the soul food of art, in a way.

I'm painting the paintings that I want to see in museums. And I'm hopefully presenting them in a way that's universal enough that they become representative of something different than just a black body on a canvas.