Jessica Stockholder Quotes

Photography is an accident.

Painting is damned difficult - you always think you've got it, but you haven't.

Although idea and form are ultimately paramount in my work, so too are chance, accident, and rawness.

It is only when I lose contact with the painting that the result is a mess. Otherwise there is pure harmony, an easy give and take, and the painting comes out well.

I never have taken a picture I've intended. They're always better or worse.

I want to make beautiful paintings. But I don't make beautiful paintings by putting beautiful paint on a canvas with a beautiful motif. It just doesn't work. I expect my paintings to be strong and surprising.

Art is lunging forward without certainty about where you are going or how to get there, being open to and dependent on what luck, the paint, the typo, the dissonance, give you. Without art you're stuck with yourself as you are and life as you think life is.

In painting, the most brilliant colors, spread at random and without design, will give far less pleasure than the simplest outline of a figure.

I always think of myself not so much as a painter but as a medium for accident and chance.

I throw down the gauntlet to chance. For example, I prepare the ground for a picture by cleaning my brush over the canvas. Spilling a little turpentine can also be helpful.

The composer makes plans, music laughs.

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

As artists, we are so not in control most of the time of the content or the narrative of our characters, and sometimes writing takes a turn and it's not something we necessarily have control over. It's just a lot of random dumb luck, so when things click, you've just got to enjoy it.

Designis a revelation to me. It's like taking something that is not alive and giving it form, shape, substance, and life.

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

Artwork is not like a commercial business; there is no such thing as a schedule for art. You can't hurry art.

I cry out for order and find it only in art.

My forms are not abstractions of things in the real world. They're also not symbols. I would say that my job is to invent these forms and to put them together in a way that keeps your interest, to give the forms a quirky identity so you can engage with them, so you realize there's an inner intelligence or logic.

Real painters understand with a brush in their hand.

In common with Michelangelo and Rembrandt I am more interested in the line, its rise and fall, than in color.

I'm a pointillist, just working my tiny little piece of the canvas. I'm not so good at perspective.

I am like a folk painter. Paint and move ahead.

There is something magical in seeing what you can do, what texture and tone and colour you can produce merely with a pen point and a bottle of ink.

Good painting is the kind that looks like sculpture.

To paint well, I need to be enraptured by my subjects.