Decorative Art Quotes

Borne out of this, starting around the 17th Century was the Baroque era. It is my view that it is one of the architectural peak periods in western civilisation.

The trend in some of the contemporary movements in art, but by no means all, seems to deny this ideal and to me appears to lead to a purely decorative conception of painting.

Ornamental pattern work, to be raised above the contempt of reasonable men, must possess three qualities: beauty, imagination and order.

I'm a collector of carvings. I love old, wooden, grotesque Gothic pieces, anything that has cherubs on it, satyrs and carved angels.

The debut show, “Second Lives: Remixing the Ordinary,” is supposed to be about how artists reuse humble or unusual materials. There’s good work here, but much of what’s on view is actually more about obsession and repetition: a couch made out of 3,500 quarters, a necklace composed of 100 handgun triggers. The building, too, seems caught between wanting to be an object of decorative delectation and making an architectural statement.

Things have to be beautifully made, even if they are full of fun, fantasy and futility

And I started with this: I have not painted at all my childhood. In fact, I never painted. But I helped my father who was a house painter and decorative painter. He made stage sets, he made glass paintings, he made everything.

I am fine, though it is hard to think of what kind of work to make at this point, other than decorative, escapist or abstract. I suppose I'll explore one or all of these things.

I like baroque things.

Composition is the art of arranging in a decorative manner the various elements which the painter uses to express his sentiments. In a picture every separate part will be visible and... everything which has no utility in the picture is for that reason harmful.

The purpose of painting is to decorate the walls. Therefore it has to be as rich as possible

The ultimate, if distant, aim of the Bauhaus is the unified work of art - the great structure - in which there is no distinction between monumental and decorative art.

Pictures deface walls more often than they decorate them.

This would be a distortion of their meaning, since the pictures are intimate and intense, and are the opposite of what is decorative; and have been painted in a scale of normal living rather than an institutional scale.

I want every family in America to have a carpet on the floor and a picture on the wall. After bread, you've got to have a picture on the wall.

If music is frozen architecture, then the potpourri is frozen coffee-table gossip... Potpourri is the art of adding apples to pears.

Look at it this way - a totem pole is just a decorated tree. My work is a confessional.

The 19th-century Continental porcelain plaques that are worth the most money are the pretty ones.

Our house was cluttered with little charms, thoughtfully placed. There were all kinds of little things going on. Like, my mom made a lampshade out of a picture of our family, but if you look closely, there's a baby Jesus that she cut up and put just above all of us.

Totem poles and wooden masks no longer suggest tribal villages but fashionable drawing rooms in New York and Paris.

But I don't think that sculpture belongs in everyday life like a table does, or like a chair.

I collect traditional Aubusson tapestries that you can hang on a wall. The last lot I bought were from an antiques fair in London.

Growing up, my room was covered in posters. I was like, "I want to make posters."

Junipers are generally chosen for the latter purpose, as they can be more readily bent into the desired form; the eyes and tongue are added afterwards, and the representation altogether is really good.

I always carry a pair of scissors around with me to cut things out of magazines.