“When the paintings suddenly started going for, like, really big money it definitely weirded me out, and I kind of went away to the middle of nowhere and I stopped making any more paintings. But the whole time the auction houses were just selling paintings that I’d done years before and sold for not much money. Or paintings that I traded for a haircut or, you know, an ounce of weed and they were going for like 50 grand.”

— Banksy

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Banksy 82

pseudonymous England-based graffiti artist, political activ…

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“So one crazy analogy to how my morality might turn out to work, and the big point here is I don't know how my morality works, is we have a painting and the painting is very beautiful. There is some crap on the painting. Would I like the crap cleaned up? Yes, very much. That's like the suffering that's in the world today. Then there is making more of the painting, that's just a strange function. My utility with the size of the painting, it's just like a strange and complicated function. It may go up in any kind of reasonable term that I can actually foresee, but flatten out, at some point.”

Holden Karnofsky (1981) American nonprofit executive

In a conversation https://intelligence.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/01-16-2014-conversation-on-existential-risk.pdf with Luke Muehlhauser and Eliezer Yudkowsky, January 2014; part of this is quoted by Carl Shulman in "Population ethics and inaccessible populations" https://reflectivedisequilibrium.blogspot.com/2014/08/population-ethics-and-inaccessible.html
Context: So one crazy analogy to how my morality might turn out to work, and the big point here is I don't know how my morality works, is we have a painting and the painting is very beautiful. There is some crap on the painting. Would I like the crap cleaned up? Yes, very much. That's like the suffering that's in the world today. Then there is making more of the painting, that's just a strange function. My utility with the size of the painting, it's just like a strange and complicated function. It may go up in any kind of reasonable term that I can actually foresee, but flatten out, at some point. So to see the world as like a painting and my utility of it is that, I think that is somewhat of an analogy to how my morality may work, that it's not like there is this linear multiplier and the multiplier is one thing or another thing. It's: starting to talk about billions of future generations is just like going so far outside of where my morality has ever been stress-tested. I don't how it would respond. I actually suspect that it would flatten out the same way as with the painting.

“There is imagery. Symbolism is a difficult idea. I'm not a symbolist. In other words, these are painting experiences. I don't decide in advance that am going to paint a definite experience, but in the act of painting, it becomes a genuine experience for me. It's not symbolism any more than it's calligraphy. I'm not painting bridge constructions, skyscrapers or laundry tickets.... I don't paint a given object – a figure or a table; I paint an organization that becomes a painting.... it's not these things that get me started on a painting.”

Franz Kline (1910–1962) American painter

1958
1960's, Talks with Seventeen Artists, 1962

“I painted for 20 years without liking them very much, you know. I burnt them at the end of every year. For 20 years I burnt the whole bunch because I didn't want them to get in the market. And well, sometimes when I was starving, I used to sell one cheap, you know. But I always regretted it because you hate to think of a painting in somebody's house that you don't like well enough, you know.”

Agnes Martin (1912–2004) American artist

after 2000, Agnes Martin: Between the Lines', 2002

“.. there comes a point when something catches on the canvas, something grips on the canvas. I don’t know what it is, you can put your paint on the surface? Most of the time it looks like paint, and who the hell wants paint on a surface? But there does come a time – you take it off, put it on, goes over here, moves over a foot, as you go closer you start moving in inches not feet, half-inches – there comes a point when the paint doesn't feel like paint. I don't know why. Some mysterious thing happens. I think you have all experienced it.... What counts is that the paint should really disappear, otherwise it's craft. That's what I mean by something grips in a canvas. The moment that happens you are then sucked into the whole thing. Like some kind of rhythm.”

Phillip Guston (1913–1980) American artist

Source: 1961 - 1980, transcript of a public forum at Boston university', conducted by Joseph Ablow 1966, p. 67

“Yes, the aluminum paint... What happened, at least for me, is that when I first started painting I would see Pollock, de Kooning, and the one thing they all had that I didn't have was an art school background. They were brought up on drawing and they all ended up painting or drawing with the brush. They got away from the smaller brushes and, in an attempt to free themselves, they got involved in commercial paint and house-painting brushes, Still it was basically drawing with paint, which has the characterized almost all twentieth century painting. The way my own painting was going, drawing was less and less necessary. It was the one thing I wasn't going to do. I wasn't going to draw with the brush.”

Frank Stella (1936) American artist

Source: Quotes, 1960 - 1970, Questions to Stella and Judd' - September 1966, p. 120

“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.”

Arshile Gorky (1904–1948) Armenian-American painter

quote of 1948
1942 - 1948
Source: Movements in art since 1945, Edward Lucie-Smith, Thames and Hudson 1975, p 32

“It's a sort of infantile thing, painting. Paint in a sense is a certain infantile thing. I mean in the handling. I start out using a brush but then I can't take the time because the idea doesn't correspond, it gets stuck when the brush goes out of paint in a certain length of time. So I have to go back and by then I might have lost the rest of it. So I take my hand and I do it. Or I have those wonderful things that came in later: paint sticks... So I had to find things that I could use, like my hands or the paint sticks... And I did those charts, big palettes... two or three paintings with palettes and all of the colours – pink, flesh, brown, red for blood. And I think with most painters you can think and it can change very fast, the impetus of what something is. It's instinctive in a certain kind of painting, not as if you were painting an object or special things, but it's like coming through the nervous system. It's like a nervous system. It's not described, it's happening. The feeling is going on with the task.”

Cy Twombly (1928–2011) American painter

Source: 2000 - 2011, Cy Twombly, 2000', by David Sylvester (June 2000), p. 179

“I wish I could paint more... I do dozens of sketches for oils.... if I do one that interests me I go on to make a painting but that happens only two or three times a year.”

Edward Hopper (1882–1967) prominent American realist painter and printmaker

Quote in 'Travelling Man', Time January 1948
1941 - 1967

“The culture-its excess-really suited me. I always liked Indian miniature painting much more than Renaissance painting. I didn't see what was so great about Rembrandt or Michelangelo. I liked paintings where there were 10,000 people in the scene and elephants and horses! I liked the carvings on Indian temples so much more than the simple architectural outlines.”

Wendy Doniger (1940) American Indologist

On the cultural aspect of India.
Q&A with Wendy Doniger, the Mircea Eliade Distinguished Service Professor and author of The Hindus

“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.”

Willem de Kooning (1904–1997) Dutch painter

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.
1960's

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