Robert Rauschenberg Quotes

Marvin Gaye said there's a song inside of me and I can't get it out. And I know it's in there, and I can feel that it's in there, and I can't get it out. There's so much that I want to say, and I haven't been able to figure out how to say it in my art. I can only say it in ham-fisted, clumsy, nonpoetic ways, and I'm trying to figure out how to talk about life and talk about love and talk about pain and trials and tribulation in an artistic form.

What is drawing? It is working oneself through an invisible iron wall that seems to stand between what one feels and what one can do.

Pain s the truth of art. Art is not a hobby or a pastime. It is the result of an internal battle royal, one between the quest for safety and the desire to matter.

Real artists take the misery and sadness of life and translate it into art.

A work of art is a world in itself reflecting senses and emotions of the artist's world.

The mediator of the inexpressible is the work of art.

An artist wears his work in place of wounds.

Drawing is like making an expressive gesture with the advantage of permanence.

What marks the artist is his power to shape the material of pain we all have.

By painting colors and lines and forms seen in quickened mood I was seeking to make this mood vibrate as a phonograph does. This was the origin of the paintings in The Frieze of Life.

What I wish to show when I paint is the way I see things with my eyes and in my heart.

When you use the language of 'fact checking' to talk about a film, I think you're sort of fundamentally misunderstanding how art works. You don't fact check Monet's 'Water Lilies.' That's not what water lilies look like; that's what the sensation of experiencing water lilies feel like. That's the goal of the piece.

If I could be more vague I'd write more about people in my life, but I hate hurting feelings or making people feel uncomfortable. I've done that before. Unless they're sad songs. Those get finished fast, but the mean ones often end up at the back of the bottom drawer and it's probably for the best.

My painting carries with it the message of pain.

We should always remember that sensitiveness and emotion constitute the real content of a work of art.

I don't like painting flowers in my music. I like painting guts and pain.

Art is the concrete representation of our most subtle feelings.

Art is the objectification of feeling, and the subjectification of nature.

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.

Sometimes I hate writing songs. Because it hurts sometimes. I'm very emotional.

Art is only a way of expressing pain.

Art after all is but an extension of language to the expression of sensations too subtle for words.

I think all the boys that write the screaming stuff would write the best love songs... because they have the most to hide. The guys that are in the most pain are usually the ones with the biggest hearts.

Art never comes from happiness.

Fear is the deep motive of abstract art - fear of a repellent civilization which is dominated by the power of things. ... who can be surprised if, more sensitive than the others, the artist is terrified by the power things have acquired over us?