Agnes Martin Quotes

No good work whatever can be perfect, and the demand for perfection is always a sign of a misunderstanding of the ends of art.

It's not about perfection. What's a perfect painting? What's interesting about a perfect painting?

I do not repudiate any of my paintings but there isn't one of them that I would not redo differently, if I had it to redo. My destination is always the same but I work out a different route to get there.

Art is not a thing; it is a way.

Painting is the passage from the chaos of the emotions to the order of the possible.

To create a work of art is to create the world.

This truth must be recognized as a dogma and assume the validity of an axiom in the general understanding of painting.

Painting is a nail to which I fasten my ideas.

Painting is a language which cannot be replaced by another language. I don't know what to say about what I paint, really.

I just like to choose projects that will allow me as an artist to make my art.

I believe that the great painters with their intellect as master have attempted to force this unwilling medium of paint and canvas into a record of their emotions.

A drawing is an autobiographical record of one's discovery of an event - either seen, remembered or imagined. A 'finished' work is an attempt to construct an event in itself.

I think when somebody's painting they don't necessarily... I'm not illustrating what I know. I'm mapping out, like topographically, some terrain I am satisfied with, how awkward that mark is.

Once I make a picture, I never look at it again.

The crucial discovery was made that, in order to become painting, the universe seen by the artist had to become a private one created by himself.

I paint. I love the visual arts.

Life is painting a picture, not doing a sum.

But I think that's a particular kind of experience involving a certain immediacy between you and the canvass, you and the particular kind of experience of that particular moment.

Great art picks up where nature ends.

You just don't know when you get all the paint across the canvas how it will turn out. When you step back after you've finished, you say, 'This one is not so good. This one is good.'

Don't bother looking at the view - I have already composed it.

I like the fact that in ancient Chinese art the great painters always included a deliberate flaw in their work: human creation is never perfect.

In my experience a painting is not made with colors and paint at all. I don't know what a painting is; who knows what sets off even the desire to paint?

Art is a reality, not a definition; inasmuch as it approaches a reality, it approaches perfection, and inasmuch as it approaches a mere definition, it is imperfect and untrue.

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.