Bram van Velde: Quotes about painting

Bram van Velde was Dutch painter. Explore interesting quotes on painting.
Bram van Velde: 194   quotes 1   like

“Of course painting is ridiculous. But it’s the only way I've got to get closer to life.”

Bram van Velde

1960's, Conversations with Samuel Beckett and Bram van Velde' (1965 - 1969)

Life , Way , Painting

“Yes, I abandoned everything. Painting required it. It was all or nothing.”

Bram van Velde

1960's, Conversations with Samuel Beckett and Bram van Velde' (1965 - 1969)

Painting

“I feel myself tied to life. To the immensity and complexity of life. Each painting is an impulse towards life.”

Bram van Velde

short quotes, 29 August 1972; pp. 92-93
1970's, Conversations with Samuel Beckett and Bram van Velde (1970 - 1972)

Life , Feeling , Painting

“Perhaps he [ Mondrian ] was too faithful to a single discovery. And perhaps that kind of painting was right for the period. But now peace and harmony are no longer possible. There is only anguish.”

Bram van Velde

1970's, Conversations with Samuel Beckett and Bram van Velde (1970 - 1972)

Peace , Faith , Painting

“The greatest moment is when you realize that the painting you've just finished is nothing. When you manage to detach yourself from it.”

Bram van Velde

1970's, Conversations with Samuel Beckett and Bram van Velde (1970 - 1972)

Painting

“Mondrian? His mind was too subtle. He worked in the light. I work in the darkness... Mondrian is the Buddha of painting. I saw him once. You wondered how a man could radiate such charisma.”

Bram van Velde

2 April 1967; p. 62
1960's, Conversations with Samuel Beckett and Bram van Velde' (1965 - 1969)

Light , Painting

“What makes a painting fascinating is its sincerity. Sincerity is such a rare thing. Most people don't dare to be sincere.”

Bram van Velde

1970's, Conversations with Samuel Beckett and Bram van Velde (1970 - 1972)

People , Painting , Sincerity

“The real world with its common logic pushes us toward catastrophe. The artists seek in his work to free himself from this weight. Art is being transformed into politics, love into trade, education into an apparatus for stifling the mind. In the midst of such horrors, clearly only the dream within me has life. But how do other people live? -There is color, virginal expression - new, without a cage, without routine, without limit, a bath of sun and light. We must realize that nothing man does is of any value. The trouble is that people want to be paid. Only sick men can be artists. Their suffering pushes them into the accomplishment of deeds which reinvest the world with meaning. The sensitive man or the artist can only be a sick man in our civilized life, so full of lies. To think of art as a profession, how appealing!”

Bram van Velde

Painting is man in the face of his downfall.
1960's
Source: Abstract Painting, Michel Seuphor, Dell Publishing Co., 1964, p. 134

Love , Life , Men , People

“I am in a thousand pieces. Painting somehow makes me whole.”

Bram van Velde

1970's, Conversations with Samuel Beckett and Bram van Velde (1970 - 1972)

Painting

“Each of my paintings is a cycle. It’s like existence, life. They are always in motion... If they were fixed and static, they would be false.”

Bram van Velde

1960's, Conversations with Samuel Beckett and Bram van Velde' (1965 - 1969)

Life , Painting , Falseness

“I am well aware that a painting must inevitably be a bizarre, incomprehensible thing.”

Bram van Velde

1970's, Conversations with Samuel Beckett and Bram van Velde (1970 - 1972)

Painting

“Painting is an eye, a blinded eye that continues to see, and sees what blinds it.... this tiny little thing, which is nothing, which dominates life.”

Bram van Velde

short quotes, 31 October 1966; p. 58
1960's, Conversations with Samuel Beckett and Bram van Velde' (1965 - 1969)

Life , Painting

“About Van Gogh.. a man who is on fire, a torch. His sincerity is absolute. His best painting is the grain field where he kills himself. There we find ourselves at the border of the art of painting. We cannot go further.”

Bram van Velde

1980's
Source: Je peins l'Impossibilité de peindre, by M. Nuridsany, newspaper Le Figaro, 24-10-1989, p. 35, as quoted in Bram van Velde, A Tribute, Municipal Museum De Lakenhal Leiden, Municipal Museum Schiedam, Museum de Wieger, Deurne 1994, p. 40 (English translation: Charlotte Burgmans)

Art , Painting , Sincerity

“Painting is being alive. Through my painting, I beat back this world that stops us living and where we are in constant danger of being destroyed... No, you have to know when to keep silent.”

Bram van Velde

short quotes, 31 December 1966; pp. 60-61
1960's, Conversations with Samuel Beckett and Bram van Velde' (1965 - 1969)

World , Painting

“I don't like talking. I don’t like people talking to me... Painting is silence.”

Bram van Velde

1960's, Conversations with Samuel Beckett and Bram van Velde' (1965 - 1969)

People , Silence , Painting

“A painting is not a battle against other people, but against oneself.”

Bram van Velde

1970's, Conversations with Samuel Beckett and Bram van Velde (1970 - 1972)

People , Painting

“Oh Baudelaire... He used to be enormously important to me. It's thanks to him that I was able to get through the war [in Paris, during 1940 – 1945 Van Velde had a long and painful break, with only a few paintings he finished]. A true loyal mind without hypocrisy. The most universal spirit. The greatest Frenchman. I have always been much less interested in painters”

Bram van Velde

than Baudelaire - a great surprise to hear for Charles Juliet the interviewer
14 September 1967; p. 66
1960's, Conversations with Samuel Beckett and Bram van Velde' (1965 - 1969)

Pain , War , Universe , Painting

“Painting is an aid to vision. It turns life, the complexity of life, into something visible. It reveals things that we don’t know how to see.”

Bram van Velde

2 April 1967; p. 62
1960's, Conversations with Samuel Beckett and Bram van Velde' (1965 - 1969)

Life , Painting

“Through painting I try to get closer to nothingness, to the void.”

Bram van Velde

1960's, Conversations with Samuel Beckett and Bram van Velde' (1965 - 1969)

Painting

“I don’t know if I've got close enough [in two recent paintings he made] to what I was really trying to achieve. But at least I've tried, I've made the attempt. I've done what I could. I've gone as far as my powers permitted.”

Bram van Velde

short quotes, 2 November 1970; p. 81
1970's, Conversations with Samuel Beckett and Bram van Velde (1970 - 1972)

Painting