Robert Rauschenberg Quotes

Painting is an illusion, a piece of magic, so what you see is not what you see.

I enjoy painting and can copy almost anything.

Draw what you see.

Painting from nature is not copying the object; it is realizing one's sensations.

I wanted to communicate what I had seen, so that others could see it.

A line, an area of tone, is not really important because it records what you have seen, but because of what it will lead you on to see. Following up its logic in order to check its accuracy, you find confirmation or denial in the object itself or in your memory of it.

In front of the camera I look and I see visually what I've created.

No painting is ever not an infinitely reproducible image any more.

The longer I look at something, the more my imagination churns and I can find somewhere to put it.

If you try to create someone else's performance, it becomes a facsimile of a facsimile.

Imitation is a caricature. Any imitation. Find out for yourself.

I'm a relentless sketcher. It goes back to how you process the world around you - the whole left-brain, right-brain thing. Some people are data-driven. I've always been more visual.

Art is supposed to hold up a mirror to its audience and ask, 'What do you believe? What do you think? What do you feel?' and if you look at a painting and it makes you feel nothing, that's a feeling as well.

Much of the way we understand the world is through images. That's what I think good art does - it teaches you how to see the historical moment that you live in.

You see certain guys enough, and you recognize pitches and stuff. Some guys you see better than others.

I am interested in relating the things we see with the things we see with our eyes closed.

Legibility, in practice, amounts simply to what one is accustomed to.

In some ways painters have been more important in my life than writers. Painters teach you how to see—a faculty that usually isn’t highly developed in poets. Whether you take a walk in the woods with a painter, or go to a museum with one, through them you notice shapes, colors, harmonies, relationships that enhance your own seeing.

A really intelligent man makes an indifferent painter. For painting requires a certain blindness, a partial refusal to be aware of all the options.

I have been continuously aware that in painting, I am always dealing with... a relational structure. Which in turn makes permission 'to be abstract' no problem at all.

Visible things can be invisible. However, our powers of thought grasp both the visible and the invisible – and I make use of painting to render thoughts visible.

I see paintings everywhere. I look at stuff and it looks like painting to me.

Drawing is not the same as form, it is a way of seeing form.

I have told myself a hundred times that painting - that is, the material thing called a painting - is no more than a pretext, the bridge between the mind of the painter and the mind of the spectator.

You see what you think, you see what you feel, you are what you see If with the camera you can make others see it - that is photography.