William Baziotes: Beginning

William Baziotes was American painter. Explore interesting quotes on beginning.

William Baziotes: 44 quotes0 likes

“One can begin a picture and carry it through and stop it and do nothing about the title at all.”

Source: Posthumous quotes, Abstract Expressionist Painting in America, (1983), p. 147

“Each painting has its own way of evolving. One may start with a few color areas on the canvas; another with a myriad of lines, another with a profusion of colors... Once I sense the suggestion I begin to paint intuitively. The suggestion then becomes a phantom that must be caught and made real. As I work, or when the painting is finished, the subject reveals itself.”

William Baziotes

I Cannot Evolve Any Concrete Theory, William Baziotes, in Possibilities, Vol. I, no. 1, New York, winter 1947-48, p. 2
William Baziotes is referring in this quote to Surrealist automatism originally a surrealist art concept
1940s

“Whereas certain people start with a recollection or an experience and paint that experience, to some of us the act of doing is the experience; so that we are not quite clear why we are engaged on a particular work. And because we are more interested in plastic matters than we are in matters of words, once can begin a painting and carry it through and stop it and do nothing about the title at all. All pictures are full of association.”

William Baziotes

Source: 1950s, Artists' Session at Studio 35, (1950), p. 217

“I think the reason we [Baziotes himself and Richard Lippold ] begin in a different way, is that this particular time has gotten to a point where the artist feels like a gambler. He does something on the canvas and takes a chance in the hope that something important will be revealed.”

William Baziotes

Source: 1950s, Artists' Session at Studio 35, (1950), p. 219

“In the beginning I drew and painted from nature in order to know her. Then later, only to fall under her spell. And today, to let her mirror my thoughts and feelings.”

William Baziotes

from the catalog of the traveling exhibition 'Nature in Abstraction', Whitney Museum of modern Art, 1958, p. 61
1950s