QUOTE: LEV TOLSTOI
“A work of art is only real when the perceiver cannot imagine any more than that which he sees or hears or understands. when the perceiver experiences a feeling similar to reminiscence, that this, he says, already was many times, that he knew this long ago, only wasn’t able to say, but now himself has...
ARTIST STUDIO: TONY CRAGG
Tony Cragg is so prolific and his sculpture uses such a variety of materials that it’s easy to imagine him covered in crap hammering away in a gritty workshop. But this picture shows him clean and well dressed in an organised space of almost religious purity; a space in Wuppertal, Germany that has twenty full...
ARTIST QUOTE: BERNARD FRIZE
I once worked on a painting for nearly three months, so there’s no way I can claim that my process is anything like Bernard Frize’s; but I actually really identify with what he’s saying here and what it implies: all paintings in a sense are documents that witness events that have occurred to...
ARTIST QUOTE: JEREMY DELLER
“Artists don’t paint these days, just as we don’t go to work on a horse.” Jeremy Deller I remember hearing this when Jeremy Deller was in the news for wining the Turner Prize and thinking that things are not quite that simple. I’ve just come across it again in Martin Gayford’s book...
ARTIST QUOTE: LOUISE BOURGEOIS
I’ve never been much of a Louise Bourgeois fan but I think she’s right in stating that modern art – true modern art – is different from any previous artistic reality in that it has an insatiable need for novelty and originality, and that there are no rights and wrongs to guide an...
ARTIST QUOTE: KAZIMIR MALÉVICH
In his book That’s The Way I See It David Hockney speaks of going through an artistic crisis in 1973, which would end up with him leaving the painting George Lawson and Wayne Sleep unfinished and eventually moving away from what he refers to as ‘obsessive naturalism’. The artist left London to live...
ARTIST QUOTE: BRUCE NAUMAN
I remember being a child and repeating the same word over and over again in my head until it lost its meaning and all of a sudden began to sound strange and alien, like it belonged to a language I didn’t understand, and then wondering why that sound represented that object and not...
ARTIST QUOTE: LUC TUYMANS
I think every artist knows what Tuymans is talking about in this quote; that feeling of unease when you have an idea for a piece and are desperate to see it take shape and nervous as to wether it will look anything like the image in your head. Also the pleasure, the pleasure of seeing...
ARTIST QUOTE: HIROSHI SUGIMOTO
The relationship we have with photography has changed profoundly almost without us noticing since the proliferation of Photoshop and the like. We still want to believe that photographs speak the truth and that what we’re seeing is what actually happened there, in front of the camera and the photographer, but the annoyingly rational...
ARTIST QUOTE: MARK ROTHKO
Most of the radical changes in painting in the late 19th and early 20th century took place on small canvases; think Van Gogh, Malevich or Juan Gris. It was a means of establishing a difference with academic 19th century canvases where artists had to prove their quality by taking on enormous projects. But when...
ARTIST QUOTE: EDWARD HOPPER
This is truly a great quote that makes one think of so much art that is being made today – and probably at any other time – that isn’t born out of true artistic necessity as described by Hopper, and inevitably leads us to boredom. Art is never boring, only its ‘digressions’. “I believe...
ARTIST QUOTE: LUCIAN FREUD
The more I read these words by Freud the more sense they make. I guess there’s no other real way to create a portrait, as anything based purely on the external aspect is unlikely to express anything profound or even interesting: ”I want paint to work as flesh, I know my idea of portraiture came...
All schools should be art schools.
