Frank Auerbach Quotes

No art is any good unless you can feel how it's put together. By and large it's the eye, the hand and if it's any good, you feel the body. Most of the best stuff seems to be a complete gesture, the totality of the artist's body; you can really lean on it.

If I'm painting, I paint every day. I'll be up in the studio from 8:00 in the morning to 8:00 at night.

Remember that a painting - before it is a battle horse, a nude model, or some anecdote - is essentially a flat surface covered with colours assembled in a certain order.

Don't bother looking at the view - I have already composed it.

I influenced the BG style by not being able to draw perspective. The BG artists developed cool graphic painting styles to make my bad backgrounds look like they were that way on purpose.

I'm 38 years old and Limp Bizkit is just something I do. If I was a painter, it would just be a type of painting I make.

To me, that is the essence of me as a photographer. It is those ideas, working with them, formulating them and eventually putting them down on paper, photographing them and then going on to the next step.

Collage is not a kitchen sink; it's not a refuge for the compositionally disabled.

Yes, I'm very expressive with my painting.

Sketching is almost everything. It is the painter's identity, his style, his conviction, and then color is just a gift to the drawing.

I have been told that some of my photographs maybe indicate that I am a painter.

The animation of the canvas is one of the hardest problems of painting.

I was a fine arts major in college, and a painter for many years. And I found that, like writing, art is very similar.

I think a painting should include more experience than simply intended statement.

When I'm painting the picture, I'm really painting a picture. I may have a flat-footed technique, or something like that, but still, to me, the thrill, or the meat of the thing, is the actual painting. I don't get any thrill out of laying it out.

I start a picture and I finish it.

I don't think you can lightly paint a picture. It's an activity I take very seriously.

I have a strange relationship with influences because mine are mostly literary or painters or poets, who I'll even quote. I don't do tributes to cinema.

This truth must be recognized as a dogma and assume the validity of an axiom in the general understanding of painting.

Some people would say my paintings show a future world and maybe they do, but I paint from reality. I put several things and ideas together, and perhaps, when I have finished, it could show the future.

I dream of painting and then I paint my dream.

I will preach with my brush.

I don't know what a painting is; who knows what sets off even the desire to paint? It might be things, thoughts, a memory, sensations, which have nothing to do directly with painting itself. They can come from anything and anywhere.

I was always interested in photography and other forms of art.

I'd rather create a miniature painting than a Taj Mahal of a book.