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“In so far as it is concerned with truth that goes beyond appearance and form, art is transcendental. The consciousness of this is often a snare for the painter who is led by a false preoccupation with some literary or intellectual conception of reality into a time-conscious literary form. Nano Reid realised with the instinct of a painter that for her the whole truth existed in the head, the body, the structure of life: it lay there revealed in the form, the line, a timeless and profound reality.”

Nano Reid (1950)

“The idea of objectivity in the evaluation of pictures introduces the concept of rational and scientific assessment. There are some sciences involved in the making and in the study of pictures, but the art itself is finally not a science and will not submit to scientific regimentation because its life depends on the degree to which it is inhabited by mystery, speaks to us of the unknown. It is simply an avoidance of the interesting difficulty to subject the inexplicable to the process of rational explanation. For since the real pleasures of painting and the reality of its meaning exist in the part of its structure which cannot be explained, all suggestions and pretensions at explanation must lead us away from the area of greatest interest. This is to say that such analysis as purports to lay bare the machinery which makes a painting work — makes it a good painting — not only leaves out the most important factor, the element of mystery, but actively denies the reality which is the justification for the art at all.”

X magazine (1959-62)

“You may know a good painter by his habit of work: a good painter works constantly.”

The Artist Speaks (1951)

“I believe when you bring, say, a plant into a room, everything in that room changes in relation to it. This tension — tension is the only word for it — can be painted.”

Time Magazine (20 October 1952).

“Painting is created from within and we must begin from within if we are to understand it.”

Italian Report (1955)

“Its purpose is moral, that is, the evaluation of experience; in the deepest sense, the development of taste.”

Some Notes on Caravaggio (1956)

“His work is full of the signs of those two cardinal sins from which (as Kafka pointed out) all the others spring: impatience and laziness. The work of every artist is conditioned by the way in which he resists or yields to these temptations.”

Some Notes on Caravaggio (1956)

“To know what it is to look at things, life as a prayer, a mass, a celebration.”

Notebooks

“The techniques for making art thus morally acceptable, of drawing its fangs, are endless; and each generation finds its own. Just now the democratic machinery for rendering art safe is so efficient that it seems that the system can absorb anything. It would be exciting to think that somewhere in Europe there was a man making art which was so violent and true that the system could not take it.”

X magazine (1959-62)

“Not to paint is the highest ambition of the painter but God who gives the gift requires that it be honoured. It is in the gesture that it lives. There is no escape.”

Portuguese Notes (Gandon Editions Biography 1993).
Context: Not to paint is the highest ambition of the painter but God who gives the gift requires that it be honoured. It is in the gesture that it lives. There is no escape. Picture-making is ludicrous in the light of the awful times we must endure. It is sufficient to contemplate the nature of composition to see that the picture itself is impossible. Each square inch of Titian contains the whole pointless — between the cradle and the grave. My paintings are merely signs that the activity was engaged in.

“Everything written about art is profoundly unimportant.”

The Artist Speaks (1951)

“They verge on the realm of the confession- hovering on that vital line between the simply revelatory and consequently vulgar, and the honest statement that is moral and consequently dignified.”

Some Notes on Caravaggio (1956)

“Good painting is not produced by any unintelligent following of inspiration or temperament.”

The Artist Speaks (1951)

“No real painter ever wants be known through any other medium than his painting.”

The Artist Speaks (1951)

“Perhaps this is the great weakness of all criticism, that it tends to take facts derived from the examination of unimportant works and applies them in making a judgement about a man whose whole importance rests in the successful work, where these facts do not exist.”

Some Notes on Caravaggio (1956)

“Life is more important than art — quantity is only important in that the amount of activity is greater not the number of works.”

Notebooks

“The painter celebrates life where he finds it. His morality is the morality of enjoyment, of the continuous development of his own taste without shame or fear. It is a sort of heroism.”

"Mob Morals and the Art of Loving Art", X, Vol. 2, No. 1 (January 1961).
X magazine (1959-62)

“All art is probably erotic in its ultimate character, but painting more than anything else is a purely nervous erotic activity… The eroticism of Caravaggio is special because it exists in that area between the simple sensual appreciation of the object which produces the desire to posses it, and the passionate but detached concern of the Observer, which also seeks to posses but to posses through understanding.”

Some Notes on Caravaggio (1956)

“In the end each man experiences only himself. To refer to your neighbour or twenty million of them for your touchstone of reality is a logical nonsense in the life of the individual person. When one reflects on the personality of Lautrec in these pictures, brave, unconcerned, scornful, and violent, it becomes a monstrosity of sophism to consider his size or shape as relevant factors. The painter celebrates life where he finds it. His morality is the morality of enjoyment, of the continuous development of his own taste without shame or fear. It is a sort of heroism.”

X magazine (1959-62)

“The interesting thing is what happens in the specific picture: its precision in terms of the sensations it produces — the illusion it creates and the effect of this illusion on the psychology opposed to it. General philosophical and technical information however interesting in itself is secondary to this reality.”

X magazine (1959-62)