If you give a meaning to certain things in my paintings it may be very true, but it is not my idea to give this meaning. What ideas and conclusions you have got I obtained too, but instinctively, unconsciously. I make the painting for the painting. I paint the objects for what they are.
Painting is a blind man's profession. He paints not what he sees, but what he feels, what he tells himself about what he has seen.
While I am working I am not conscious of what I am putting on the canvas.
I destroy the painting as soon as I can see what it is. When I can make out something in it, I destroy it because it's no longer coming from my unconscious.
Painters hate having to explain what their work is about. They always say, 'It's whatever you want it to be' - because I think that's their intention, to connect with each person's subconscious, and not to try and dictate.
Real art is basic emotion. If a scene is handled with simplicity - and I don't mean simple - it'll be good, and the public will know it.
In art, truth and reality begin when one no longer understands what one is doing or what one knows, and when there remains an energy that is all the stronger for being constrained, controlled and compressed.
Rule of art: let half-blind purpose lead you.
I think it is more of an intuitive, circular kind of personality, for starters. And, as I say of horses, the secret to breeding great horses is the three B's: bones, brains, and balance. If you look at art, it shares some of the same qualities.
Art arises from sources other than logic." (p.32)
The artist need not know very much; best of all let him work instinctively and paint as naturally as he breathes or walks.
I rarely draw what I see. I draw what I feel in my body.
I've dreamed landscapes for years, and my dreams play an enormous role in my work. In fact, when I first started doing landscapes I felt insecure about painting in this style, and the dreams were like positive omens for me, and I've done a few paintings that were exact replicas of images that came to me in dreams.
Painting fulfills a need to be non-intellectual. There are times when we have to get our brains out in our fingers.
'Healing,' Papa would tell me, 'is not a science, but the intuitive art of wooing nature.'
It's as if I were collaborating with myself, revealing my relationship to the material. My hand would make the drawing. Then my mouth would transmit it.
Drawing is not following a line on the model, it is drawing your sense of the thing.
When I'm painting, I'm not aware of what I'm doing. It's only after a get acquainted period that I see what I've been about. I've no fears about making changes for the painting has a life of its own.
When I write, I feel that I'm writing with my intellect. When I paint, I think it's some other force making me paint. I - as I wrote in my novel 'My Name is Red' - watch with amazement what my hand is doing on the paper, what kind of line, what kind of strange, beautiful thing it's doing in spite of my will, so to speak.
Sketching is like dancing. It's process as much as product. You can turn your head off and just sort of dissolve into the now. Doing a giant, super thought-out painting is the opposite of that.
For 'Picture This,' I wanted it to be a drawing book that didn't have any instructions about drawing, beyond the real simple stuff you'd find like in a Bazooka bubblegum wrapper, or in 'Highlights' magazine. I just wanted it to be feelings about looking and seeing and pictures.
There are some projects where you have to just start doing it, and, after a while, the show starts telling you what it wants to be. You put your spirit in and, after a while, something bigger takes over, and it turns out to be much more fun and creative than what it was at the beginning.
Today painters do not have to go to a subject matter outside of themselves. Most modern painters work from a different source. They work from within.
I like the idea of creating from your inner youth. You don't have to think too hard about it. Just make what feels good.
That's the best kind of music: the stuff that happens based off intuition.
