Art Completion Quotes

Each one of these bodies (art-works Arp made) certainly signifies something, but it is only once there is nothing left for me to change that I begin to look for its meaning, that I give it a name.

Allow the artist to finish the piece of work before you critique it.

Negatives are the notebooks, the jottings, the false starts, the whims, the poor drafts, and the good draft but never the completed version of the work The print and a proper one is the only completed photograph, whether it is specifically shaded for reproduction, or for a museum wall.

Art objects are inanimate sad bits of matter hanging in the dark when no one is looking. The artist only does half the work; the viewer has to come up with the rest, and it is by empowering the viewer that the miracle of art gains its force.

The recognition of the art that informs all pure science need not mean the abandonment for it of all present art, rather it will mean the completion of the transformation of art that has already begun.

There's something imminent in the work, but the circle is only completed by the viewer.

The picture's over. Now I have to go and put it on film.

Completing a piece of art and using all of the elements of making a film, was satisfying, for sure.

No work of Art is really ever finished. They only stop at good places.

Whenever you finish an artwork and the viewer comes and views it, at that moment you've given up control.

The idea of being close to where pigments were mined - that's the first thing in making a painting, getting the material. And what's the last thing you do in making a painting? You put a frame around it.

There's that old cliche that art is never finished, only abandoned. That's the nice thing about comics. It forces you to abandon it long before maybe you're ready to let it go.

You can never really judge your work because once it's done, it's done.

It is, perhaps more than anything else, the arrest of time which has taken place in a completed work of art that gives certain plays their feeling of depth and significance.

I don't think there's any single finished point for a work. It's done when something's happening with the work that feels like a balanced, coherent disharmony. That's one way to say it. And where if I keep working on it, to discover and struggle with new problems, I'll obliterate the ones I was working on. I could keep working on it, but it'd become something different. And I value what's here, at the moment.