Antoni Tapies Quotes

I believe art is a way to attune to what reality is, which is a weird reality.

Art, of course, is a way of thinking, a way of mining reality.

My mirror probes down to the heart. I write words on the forehead and around the corners of the mouth. My human faces are truer than the real ones.

The real wonders of life lie in the depths. Exploring the depths for truths is the real wonder which the child and the artist know: magic and power lie in truth.

All art is a vision penetrating the illusions of reality, and photography is one form of this vision and revelation.

Art is a lie that makes us realise truth ... that is given us to understand.

We accept reality so readily - perhaps because we sense that nothing is real.

If there is any reason to single out artists as being more necessary to our lives than any others, it is because they provide us with light that cannot be extinguished. They go into dark rooms and poke at their souls until the contours of our own are familiar to us.

To sing means to sense and to affirm that the spirit is real and that its glory is present.

Art is a divine thing. It can only be rightly expressed if opposed, to bring out its inner beauty that lies behind.

Art exists because reality is neither real nor significant.

Art is the most beautiful deception of all!

Without art we would be nothing but foreground and live entirely in the spell of that perspective which makes what is closest at hand and most vulgar appear as if it were vast, and reality itself.

Art is not truth; art is the lie which makes us see the truth.

Every real form is a world. And any plastic surface is more alive than a face from which stares a pair of eyes and a smile.

I feel like you can't really be truthful as an artist and empathize with the human experience, unless you know your truth and you're not living a lie. So I'm learning through it, and it's making me a better person, and it's making me a better artist, I think.

Real art is illumination, it adds stature to life.

I destroy the painting as soon as I can see what it is. When I can make out something in it, I destroy it because it's no longer coming from my unconscious.

That’s one of the nice things about writing, or any art; if the thing’s real, it just lives.

In earlier times artists liked to show what was actually visible... nowadays we are concerned with reality, rather than the merely visible.

The impulse to create begins - often terribly and fearfully - in a tunnel of silence. Every real poem is the breaking of an existing silence, and the first question we might ask any poem is, What kind of voice is breaking silence, and what kind of silence is being broken?

An odd contradiction, if the layman were correct in his unconscious assumption that an artist begins with reality and ends with art: the converse is true - to the degree that this dichotomy has any truth - the artist begins with art, and through it arrives at reality.

I never drew a picture of anything that was before me but always from fancy, a sure sign of the absence of artistic eyesight; and I illustrated my lack of real feeling for art by a very early speech: 'Mama,' said I, 'I have drawed a man. Shall I draw his soul now?

Drawing is what you see of the world, truly see...And sometimes what you see is so deep in your head you're not even sure of what you're seeing. But when it's down there on paper, and you look at it, really look, you'll see the way things are...that's the world, isn't it? You have to keep looking to find the truth.

Writing is really wonderful art. A lot of this is discovery. A lot of things are lying around waiting to be discovered and that's our job as writers is to just notice them and bring them to life.