Peter Saul Quotes

In art and music, particularly in the 20th century, there was a big period there where for something to be called profound you had to not be able to understand it.

People always say that my work is sensational or shocking but there are truly shocking things you could do, and my sculptures don't go anywhere near that.

The more horrific works came out of a feeling that everyone accepted my stuff too easily. I was deliberately trying to be antagonistic towards collectors and critics.

The avant-garde makes more sense to me.

As far as the style, I was fascinated by surrealism.

Picabia is a very old painter who some people try to connect me to, but I refuse such comparisons very well.

But surrealism is present in most of my pictures.

For me, surrealism is in my blood; it's not an effort.

Warhol was definitely an inspiration when I was younger. I wouldn't quantify his sort of influence. I've been influenced by nature and science, and I've been influenced by people like Ernst and Rauschenberg, Cornell and Bosch and Bruegel, by writers like Haruki Murakami to Pablo Neruda to Artaud.

The big shock of my life was Abstract Expressionism - Pollock, de Kooning, those guys. It changed my work. I was an academically trained student, and suddenly you could pour paint, smear it on, broom it on!

My mother was a Bloomsbury figure: a great friend of TS Eliot, Duncan Grant, Vanessa Bell. My grandmother, Mary Hutchinson, gave her life to works of art, being an admirer of Matisse and Giaometti, whom I collected as a young man because of her.

Damien Hirst is the Elvis of the English art world, its ayatollah, deliverer, and big-thinking entrepreneurial potty-mouthed prophet and front man. Hirst synthesizes punk, Pop Art, Jeff Koons, Marcel Duchamp, Francis Bacon, and Catholicism.

I painted with my husband a portrait of a naked Serge Gainsbourg draped with a French flag, and it hangs in our bedroom. I love gritty and dark art like what the German couple Herakut does.

A metaphysical tour de force of untethered meaning and involuting interlocking contrapuntal rhythms, 'The Clock' is more than a movie or even a work of art. It is so strange and other-ish that it becomes a stream-of-consciousness algorithm unto itself - something almost inhuman.

I find beauty in the grotesque, like most artists.

My father was a painter and an anarchist, always getting in trouble for his performance art.

Urs Fischer specializes in making jaws drop. Cutting giant holes in gallery walls, digging a crater in Gavin Brown's gallery floor in 2007, creating amazing hyperrealist wallpaper for a group show at Tony Shafrazi: It all percolates with uncanny destructiveness, operatic uncontrollability, and barbaric sculptural power.

I don't want to paint rainbows: I want to make art that disturbs identity and challenges authority.

Surrealism had a great effect on me because then I realised that the imagery in my mind wasn't insanity. Surrealism to me is reality.

You never know when contemporary art is going to insinuate itself into a normally art-free zone.

I have a soft spot for art that, in terms of subject matter and material, is in bad taste.

Like Robert Mapplethorpe, Helmut Newton, and so many others before me, sexual imagery has always been a part of my photography.

I had a Stuart Davis poster growing up.

A painting has to be beautiful. Even in its grotesqueness.

One reason I think I am able to work with such dark material is the fact I was never really discouraged from making this kind of work.