Pablo Picasso Quotes

When you start with a portrait and try to find pure form by abstracting more and more, you must end up with an egg.

When one starts from a portrait and seeks by successive eliminations to find pure form... one inevitably ends up with an egg.

At that point it certainly would be called abstract. That is to say, you had a model and there'd be one or two or three people there drawing the model but otherwise you had abstractions all around the room, even though the model was in front of you.

There is no abstract art. You must always start with something. Afterward you can remove all traces of reality.

So much of art-making is about reducing things to the essentials, so I don't feel particularly crippled by this. I don't want it to look natural because then I would be making a documentary film.

I've always felt the portrait is an occasion for marks to happen. I've never viewed the portrait as about the sitter. Even when I go to the National Portrait Gallery, I'm not thinking about the sitter; I'm thinking about how the artist chose that color or that highlight. It becomes about the time, place, and context.

The art of drawing is the art of omission.

I don't see those paintings as abstractions, especially because they are emblems of the inkblot. They aren't smashed together; they are constructed shape-by-shape, layer-by-layer, like any other picture.

Pure drawing is an abstraction.

My tendency towards bareness and simplification has been practiced in three fields: modeling, colors, and the figuration of the personages.

Sometimes I'm drawing onto a computer directly, sometimes I'm drawing on paper , so I can't really talk about drafts. It's just like having soft clay until it hardens. At least as much of the problem has to do with the decisions of what to represent, how to represent that, and how to reduce it down. The words in the balloons aren't particularly poetic necessarily, but it has the same problem as poetry, which is that one has to do great reduction. And if I tried to draw everything, you'd just have a tangled mess of a picture. The stripping down takes much longer than building up.

You take a painting, you have a white, virginal piece of canvas that is the world of purity, and then you put your imagery on it, and you try to bring it back to the original purity.

Pictures must be miraculous: the instant one is completed, the intimacy between the creation and the creator is ended.

I do remember at my very first opening in 1979 another artist coming up to me, and he was haranguing me, saying, "Did you really intend for these things to be so dumb? You just put it there and took a picture of it." He wouldn't let it go. So that's what made me think about the dumbness aspect more.

However, I must stress that my own interest is immediate and in the picture. What I am conscious of and what I feel is the picture I am making, the relation of that picture to others I have made and, more generally, its relation to others I have experienced.

I am an artist. For me, a picture is like poetry. When you make art, this is not coming from an intellectual place. It's coming from the deep side of your unconscious, your soul. And you are like in some kind of possession, where you are doing anything to get the visual. You become another person. You're becoming an artist in action. And then a lot of miracles come. A lot of discovering. It's a very complicated thing.

My pictures are devoid of objects; like objects, they are themselves objects. This means that they are devoid of content, significance or meaning, like objects or trees, animals, people or days, all of which are there without a reason, without a function and without a purpose. This is the quality that counts. Even so, there are good and bad pictures.

Painting allows me to use other portions of my brain pleasurably. Irony plays no part in what or how I paint. I paint the particular subject matter not to make polemical points but because I am interested in the human imprint on the landscape. I paint the landscape of my time and place with the stuff in it.

I drew pictures rapidly and with few lines, because I had to write most of the pieces, too, and couldn't monkey long with the drawings. The divine urge was no higher than that.

If drawing belongs to the world of spirit and color to that of the senses, you must draw first to cultivate the spirit.

My drawings are the result of my sculpture.

I really like the idea of banality and repetition being used to generate the image, which are simple and unobstructed and not captivated by composition.

What the work of art looks like isn't too important. It has to look like something if it has a physical form. No matter what form it may finally have it must begin with an idea. It is the process of conception and realization with which the artist is concerned.

As far as the surface is concerned - oil on canvas, conventionally applied - my pictures have little to do with the original photograph. They are totally painting (whatever that may mean). On the other hand, they are so like the photograph that the thing that distinguished the photograph from all other pictures remains intact.

I see for others... in order to put on canvas the sudden apparitions which come to me.