Gerhard Richter Quotes

I'm very representational some of the time, and a little all of the time. But when you're painting out of your unconscious, figures are bound to emerge.

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.

When I see people making 'abstract' painting, I think it's just a dialogue and a dialogue isn't enough. That is to say, there is you painting and this canvas. I think there has to be a third thing; it has to be a trialogue.

Painting today is pure intuition and luck and taking advantage of what happens when you splash the stuff down.

I've had a period of drawing on canvas in black - with some of my early images coming thru -, think the non-objectivists will find them disturbing - and the kids who think it simple to splash a 'Pollock' out.

There are some people who may not like precision in their art. They may like it to be grittier and more gestural, more of a direct expression in the way that a painter would put his strokes on canvas.

I'm not knocking conceptual art; it's another department, but it doesn't move me like painting.

If you want to paint the inner life, you paint it from the exterior. From the exterior, you breathe the inner life into your painting.

When I'm painting, I'm not aware of what I'm doing. It's only after a get acquainted period that I see what I've been about. I've no fears about making changes for the painting has a life of its own.

I don't work from drawings. I don't make sketches and drawings and color sketches into a final painting.

I'll take anything and slap it on a canvas.

I influenced the BG style by not being able to draw perspective. The BG artists developed cool graphic painting styles to make my bad backgrounds look like they were that way on purpose.

Painting is the most magical of mediums. The transcendence is truly amazing to me every time I go to a museum and I see how somebody figured another way to rub colored dirt on a flat surface and make space where there is no space or make you think of a life experience.

I have never subscribed to the Dirty Pallet school of painting.

I try and take the photographs and paintings and make them real. And the real video we treat as paintings. We flip the reality.

I'm inspired by Jackson Pollock; splashing layer upon layer, using different materials, experimenting with new methods to produce something fresh. I'd love to be able to create in this way!

Once my paintings are complete, the model no longer lives in the painting as themselves. I see something bigger, more symbolic - an archetype.

Perspective is to painting what the bridle is to the horse, the rudder to a ship.

Once you start painting, you could of course get lost. I mean you get out of yourself, you don't know whether you're thinking, you just act actually sometimes.

To abstract is to draw out the essence of a matter. To abstract in art is to separate certain fundamentals from irrelevant material which surrounds them.

I think about art a lot only in two contexts. One is narrative... The other thing that I'm interested in, which is tangential, but not unrelated... All art to me is about problem solving.

Art is very mysterious. I wonder if you can really do any damage to art. I think that when we're writing, something comes through or should come through, in spite of our theories. So theories are not really important.

Painting is the art of hollowing a surface.

The emotions are sometimes so strong that I work without knowing it. The strokes come like speech.

In art, as long as you have ideas and think, you are bound to deform nature. Art is deformation.