The impulse for me to want to make sculpture is because I want to make statements, really, on a purely emotional level. And it's also somewhat of a challenge to see how that can be done with materials and objects that really are not emotional, in and of themselves.
Anything is good painting material once you get to know it.
People talk about medium. What is your medium? My medium as a writer has been dirt, clay, sand--what I could touch, hold, stand on, and stand for--Earth. My medium has been Earth. Earth in correspondence with my mind.
I trust Winsor and Newton and I paint directly upon it.
To me, a drop of oil paint or a xerographic dot are the same thing - they're all just language.
To me, art supplies are always okay to buy.
Since the tubes of paint used by the artist are manufactured and ready-made products, we must conclude that all the paintings in the world are 'ready-mades aided' and also works of assemblage.
Yes, linseed oil. I used to use poppy oil, but I have heard that poppy oil is given to cracking pigment too, so I use it no longer.
I think we're in an age where artists really have an incredible range of materials at their command now. They can use almost anything from household items - Jackson Pollock used house paint - to, you know, advanced computer systems, to good old oil paint and acrylic paint.
On the whole, the modern palette is the same as the one used by the artists of Pompeii... I mean it has not been enriched. The ancients used earths, ochres, and ivory-black - you can do anything with that palette.
I see my practice as picture making. Whatever is available, I use.
Give me some mud off a city crossing, some ochre out of a gravel pit and a little whitening and some coal dust and I will paint you a luminous picture if you give me time to gradate my mud and subdue my dust.
Art is much more confined by materials than writing is.
It is the custom of Venice to paint on canvas, either because it does not split and is not worm-eaten, or because pictures can be made of any size desired, or else for convenience... so that they can be sent anywhere with very little trouble and expense.
When we speak of the perfection of art, we must recollect what the materials are with which a painter contends with nature. For the light of the sun he has but patent yellow and white lead - for the darkest shade, umber or soot.
It is vain for painters... to endeavour to invent without materials on which the mind may work.
I find linseed oil and white lead the most satisfactory mediums.
New materials are one of the great afflictions of contemporary art. Some artists confuse new materials with new ideas.
I love my blocks of marble, always piling up in the yard like a flock of sheep.
I had been thinking about rubber all along. Like as the novel's element, or base material. A lot of artists in the late '60s and early '70s worked with rubber and other forms that seemed like they connoted industrial detritus. Robert Morris, Eva Hesse.
