The creative process is a cocktail of instinct, skill, culture and a highly creative feverishness.
Everybody has his own interpretation of a painting he sees...
A picture should be a re-creation of an event rather than an illustration of an object; but there is no tension in the picture unless there is a struggle with the object.
One always starts work with the subject, no matter how tenuous it is, and one constructs an artificial structure by which one can trap the reality of the subject-matter that one has started from.
No artist knows in his own lifetime whether what he does will be the slightest good, because it takes at least seventy-five to a hundred years before the thing begins to sort itself out.
I should have been, I don’t know, a con-man, a robber or a prostitute. But it was vanity that made me choose painting, vanity and chance.
As you work, the mood grows on you. There are certain images which suddenly get hold of me and I really want to do them. But it’s true to say that the excitement and possibilities are in the working and obviously can only come in the working.
It is the peculiar and perpetual error of the human understanding to be more moved and excited by affirmatives than by negatives.
A cat will never drown if she sees the shore.
It is a great happiness when men’s professions and their inclinations accord.
If my people look as if they’re in a dreadful fix, it’s because I can’t get them out of a technical dilemma.
I want to make portraits and images. I don’t know how. Out of despair, I just use paint anyway. Suddenly the things you make coagulate and take on just the shape you intend. Totally accurate marks, which are outside representational marks.
I don’t believe art is available; it’s rare and curious and should be completely isolated; one is more aware of its magic the more it is isolated.
Velazquez found the perfect balance between the ideal illustration which he was required to produce, and the overwhelming emotion he aroused in the spectator.
The mystery lies in the irrationality by which you make appearance – if it is not irrational, you make illustration.
Great art is deeply ordered. Even if within the order there may be enormously instinctive and accidental things, nevertheless they come out of a desire for ordering and for returning fact onto the nervous system in a more violent way.
We only have our nervous system to paint.
Painting is the pattern of one’s own nervous system being projected on canvas.
I’m just trying to make images as accurately as possible off my nervous system as I can.
I loathe my own face, and I’ve done self-portraits because I’ve had nobody else to do.