Dogen Zenji Quotes

I think of rivers, of tides. Forests and water gushing out. Rain and lightning. Rocks and shadows. All of these are in me.

I paint from the top down. From the sky, then the mountains, then the hills, then the houses, then the cattle, and then the people.

All gardening is landscape painting.

I like all those painters who loved and had a strong feeling for nature.

Landscape is to American painting what sex and psychoanalysis are to the American novel.

Mount Tamalpais became my house. For Cezanne, Sainte-Victoire was no longer a mountain. It was an absolute. It was painting.

I'm just a landscape painter. I look out the window and I see what's going on, and I paint it. While I'm painting it, I also write thoughts about what I see going on out there.

David Hockney is best known for his work with paint and canvas, but he has also worked in media as diverse as Polaroid-photo collage and fax painting.

Painting gives the object itself; poetry what it implies. Painting embodies what a thing contains in itself; poetry suggests what exists out of it, in any manner connected with it.

All things that come into being and grow are earth and water.

The charnel ground is that great graveyard in which the complexities of samsara and nirvana lie buried.

You walk for days among trees and among stones. Rarely does the eye light on a thing, and then only when it has recognized that thing as the sign of another thing: a print in the sand indicates the tiger's passage; a marsh announces a vein of water; the hibiscus flower, the end of winter. All the rest is silent and interchangeable; trees and stones are only what they are.

Every painted image of something is also about the absence of the real thing. All painting is about the presence of absence.

I think there's a reason why wine figures into so many religions. There's something transcendent about it. It's sort of the way that music is more than the sum of its parts. You have all these elements that make up the terroir that wine can communicate.

I trust the symbol that is arrived at in the making of the painting. Meaningful symbols aren't invented as such, they are made or discovered as symbol later.

If you study carefully, you will see that Buddhism is based on reason. There is an element of flexibility inherent in it, which is not found in any other religion.

We'll get to the details of what's around here, but it looks like a collection of just about every variety of shape - angularity, granularity, about every variety of rock.... The colors - well.... There doesn't appear to be too much of a general color at all; however, it looks as though some of the rocks and boulders are going to have some interesting colors to them. Over.

The landscape everywhere, away from the river, is of rock - cliffs of rock; plateaus of rock; terraces of rock; crags of rock - ten thousand strangely carved forms.

What are men to rocks and mountains?

Fire is a natural symbol of life and passion, though it is the one element in which nothing can actually live.

I want my paintings to look like what's going on outside my window rather than what's inside my studio.

So it is not a matter of whether it is possible to attain Buddhahood, or if it is possible to make a tile a jewel. But just to work, just to live in this world with this understanding is the most important point, and that is our practice. That is true zazen.

Butterflies doing strange things in very beautiful ways were in my mind when I sat down, but by the time my pen was uncapped my thoughts had shifted to rocks.

All the earth colours of the painter's palette are out there in the many miles of badlands.