Gerhard Richter Quotes

I'm trying to paint a picture of what I have seen and what moved me, as well as I can. That's all.

Art is a reflection of everything that impacts your life.

Any form of art is a form of power; it has impact, it can affect change - it can not only move us, it makes us move.

I still paint. I love the joy that color can give to our lives and to our communities. I try to bring something of the artist in me to my politics.

I've been changed watching films or reading books or hearing music, and that helps you to live your life.

I don't think events in your life affect your music.

Art is not a mirror to reflect the world, but a hammer with which to shape it

I loved working on 'Dogfight,' but when I first read it and wrapped my head around the story, I was a little horrified.

Politics is downstream from culture.

I would think, as an artist, it's inescapable that you'll be affected by the world around you.

A poet's work consists less in seeking words for his ideas than in seeking ideas for his words and predominant rhythms.

The idea is that what an artist lives through should broaden his notion of what it is possible for a human being to live through, and that new understanding should then get into and expand the work.

If an artist may say nothing except what he has invented by his own sole efforts, it stands to reason he will be poor in ideas. If he could take what he wants wherever he could find it, as Euripides and Dante and Michelangelo and Shakespeare and Bach were free, his larder would always be full, and his cookery might be worth tasting.

The basic unit for contemporary art is not the idea, but the analysis of and extension of sensations.

I think art is the ability to change people with your work, to see things as they are and then create stories, images, and interactions that change the marketplace.

The idea that creative endeavor and mind-altering substances are entwined is one of the great pop-intellectual myths of our time.

Because it's visual art, a lot of it comes from childhood experience but then a lot comes from the visual language - in advertising and stuff like that - which is around us.

I think art can really serve to inspire a movement - and, of course, it has in the past. The Civil Rights movement wouldn't have the same resonance without the songs from everyone from Pete Seeger to Odetta to James Brown.

Thus art is not an object, it is an experience.

My work is not, of course, pure art in the sense that Schmidt-Rottluff's is, but it is art nonetheless... It is all right with me that my work serves a purpose. I want to have an effect on my time, in which human beings are so confused and in need of help.

grievance does not make for great art.

I thought for a long time that within art, that you would come up with an idea, you would labor over it intensely until you felt like it was done, and then when you finished it, that was the final stage. I started to realize that that's not actually the completion of it. The final stage of any kind of art is to really lose control over it and let it affect other people. You can't control the effect that it has on people, but you hope that it has some sort of reaction. You just hope that they're not indifferent to it, you wanna make people feel something, whether it's love or hate.

I was meticulously copying other art and then I realized I could just use a camera and put my time into an idea instead.

A lot of young painters love to incorporate celebrity. One idea of being a painter is to use what's happening at the time. Velázquez was painting of his time. And so was Rembrandt. And Francis Bacon was painting his time in London. He was a real mover, but he saw the insect in the rose. But yes, when I do a painting, I want to take the "I did this" out of it. That's why I started using chance, like the markings on the wood. I never wanted to compose.

I endeavor to make a picture, for instance, exert a positive influence on the observer by its coloring, mood, and compositional idea, encouraging, say, activation, tranquilization, concentration, or harmony.