„When I am in my painting, I am not aware of what I'm doing. It is only after a short of 'get acquainted' period that I see what I have been about. I have no fears about making changes, destroying the image, etc., because the painting has a life of its own. I try to let it come through. It is only when I lose contact with the painting that the result is a mess. Otherwise there is pure harmony, an easy give and take, and the painting comes out well.“

— Jackson Pollock, In 'Possibilities', Vol. 1, no 1, winter 1947-48, p. 79; as quoted in Jackson Pollock (1983) by Elizabeth Frank, p. 68

Jackson Pollock2

US-amerikanischer Maler 1912 - 1956

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„I feel now if I think of it, it will come out in the painting. In other words, if I want to make the whole painting look like a bottle, like a lot of bottles - for instance maybe the end of the day, when everything is very light, but not in sunlight necessarily - and so if I have this image of this bottle and if I really think about it, it will come out in the painting. That doesn’t mean that people notice a bottle, but I know when I succeed in it – then the painting would have this.“

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— Willem de Kooning Dutch painter 1904 - 1997
interview conducted by David Sylvester for the BBC, 1962; as quoted in Abstract Expressionism: Creators and Critics, edited by Clifford Ross, Abrahams Publishers, New York 1990, p. 49.

„I maintain that the frustration is an important, almost crucial, ingredient. I think that the best painting involves frustration. The point about the late Rembrandt [paintings] is not that it's satisfying but on the contrary that it is disturbing and frustrating. Because really, what he [Rembrandt] has done is to eliminate any plane - anything between that image and you. The Van Dyck [portrait] hasn't. It says [only] I'm a painting. The Rembrandt says: I am not a painting, I am a real man. But he is not a real man either. What is it then, that you are looking at?“

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— Phillip Guston American artist 1913 - 1980
p. 97

„I paint my own reality. The only thing I know is that I paint because I need to, and I paint whatever passes through my head without any other consideration.“

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— Frida Kahlo Mexican painter 1907 - 1954

„I painted like that because I wanted to get through to something new - a kind of painting that was my own.“

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— Georges Seurat French painter 1859 - 1891
quote from Seurat, John Russell; Thames & Hudson, London 1965

„I make what it pleases me to make.... I have no ideas about what the paintings imply about the world. I don't think that's a painter's business. He just paints paintings without a conscious reason. I intuitively paint flags.“

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— Jasper Johns American artist 1930
Quote of Jasper Johns, as cited in Trend to the Anti-Art: Targets and Flags, Newsweek 51 no. 13, March 1958, p. 96

„In 1946 what I call my 'Little Image' began breaking through this [former] gray matter of mine. I felt fantastic relief that something was beginning to happen after all this time when there was nothing, nothing, nothing... The canvas is down on a floor or table and I am working out of a tiny can. In other words, I have to hold the paint so I can move it. But I wouldn’t have been using Duco [industrial paint, like Willem de Kooning did]. My paint would always have been oil and I could get the consistency of a thick pouring quality in it by squeezing it into a can and cutting it with turp [turpetine] – the way I use paint today... The only thing I can say with absolute assurance is that my 'Little Image' work starts about 1946 and ends in 1949.“

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— Lee Krasner American artist 1908 - 1984
p. 77.

„Painting is so stupid, so simple. I paint to get out of the through. I paint my misery.“

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— Bram van Velde Dutch painter 1895 - 1981

„I don't like that word 'finish'. When something is finished, that means it's dead, doesn't it? I believe in everlastingness. I never finish a painting – I just stop working on it for a while. I like painting because it's something I never come to the end of. Sometimes I paint a picture, then I paint it all out. Sometimes I'm working on fifteen or twenty pictures at the same time. I do that because I want to – because I like to change my mind so often. The thing to do is always to keep starting to paint, never finishing painting. [quote of 1948]“

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— Arshile Gorky Armenian-American painter 1904 - 1948
In: Movements in art since 1945, Edward Lucie-Smith, Thames and Hudson 1975, p 32

„Painting is not what my life is about, but it is very important to me, and I am very lucky to be able to give some time to it. The time that I devote to painting is not a lot of time, but I do it 100 percent while I am working, and then there's nothing else that counts.“

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— Margrethe II of Denmark Queen of Denmark 1940
Interview with Reuters, quoted on ITN. http://www.itnsource.com/shotlist/RTV/2012/01/26/RTV249512/ (26 January 2012).

„Idiots can do what I do. When I first started to do this [projecting photos on the canvas and painting them after having them traced in details with a piece of charcoal] in the 60's, people laughed. I clearly showed that I painted from photographs. It seemed so juvenile. The provocation was purely formal - that I was making paintings like photographs. Nobody asked about what was in the pictures. Nobody asked who my Aunt Marianne was. That didn't seem to be the point.“

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— Gerhard Richter German visual artist, born 1932 1932
Richter's aunt had been murdered by the Nazis in the name of euthanasia, a crime for which his father-in-law from his first marriage, a Nazi doctor named Heinrich Eufinger, had been partially responsible. Richter painted a portrait of his aunt in 1965, based on an old photo. It was called 'Tante Marianne' / 9Aunt Marianne).

„See, I never understand why my paintings hold together because I don't have any tricks for doing it and that is usually what makes a painting academic. There were some well-known devices for making a painting work hold together, ave cohesion. This seemed to be organized. But I don't necessarily have to know what the mechanism is. For me, what it really is, is something you have in yourself that makes you feel, it gives the painting a feeling of unity, of oneness, and being of all of one piece.“

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— Adolph Gottlieb American artist 1903 - 1974
p. 55-59.

„Well I think it [a 'Little Image' painting] does suggest hieroglyphics of some sort. It is a preoccupation of mine from way back and every once in a while it comes into my work again. For instance in my 1968 show at the Marlborough I have a painting called 'Kufic', an ancient form of Arabic writing. Every once in a while I fall back to what I call my mysterious writings. I haven no idea what this is about but it runs through periods of my work.“

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— Lee Krasner American artist 1908 - 1984
p. 78.

„... this bull is a bull and this horse is a horse... 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.“

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— Pablo Picasso Spanish painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist, and stage designer 1881 - 1973
Quoted in: Paul Jones (2011), The Sociology of Architecture: Constructing Identities. p. 47. Other explanation by Picasso of the Guernica.

„In the coming year I must do a large painting which will definitely get me recognized for what I truly am, for I want all or nothing. All those little paintings are not the only thing that I can do... I want to do large-scale painting. One thing is certain, that within five years, I must have a name in Paris; that is what I strive for. It's hard to get there, I know... To move faster I only lack one thing, and that's money, in order to boldly execute what I have in mind.“

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— Gustave Courbet French painter 1819 - 1877
Quote from his letter (10 March 1845); as cited in 'Gustave Courbet', by Georges Riat, Parkstone International, 2015 very soon after this letter Courbet attacked a canvas of eight feet high and ten feet wide

„It would be a sad thing for an artist if he knew how to paint. – so sad. An artist paints because it is a challenge to him – it is like trying to twist the devil. If you overcome it, there is no sport left. I don't even like to talk about painting. It is impossible to talk about painting because I don't know what it is. If I knew what it was I would get out a patent and then no one else would be able to paint.“

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— Arshile Gorky Armenian-American painter 1904 - 1948

„Color is one of the great things in the world that makes life worth living to me and as I have come to think of painting it is my effort to create an equivalent with paint color for the world – life as I see it.“

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— Georgia O'Keeffe American artist 1887 - 1986