“All artists whether primitive or sophisticated, have been involved in the handling of chaos.”

— Barnett Newman

Source: 1940 - 1950, The Plasmic Image 1. 1943-1945, p. 139

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Barnett Newman 25

American artist 1905–1970

Stephen Rotluanga (1952)

Nude figures, Mizo bishop's tribute to God https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/guwahati/Nude-figures-Mizo-bishops-tribute-to-God/articleshow/4834560.cms?referral=PM (July 29, 2009)

“The present painter can be said to work with chaos not only in the sense that he is handling the chaos of the blank picture plane, but also in that he is handling the chaos of form. In trying to go beyond the visible and the known world he is working with forms that are unknown even to him. He is therefore engaged in a true act of discovery in the creation of new forms and symbols that will have the living quality of creation.”

Barnett Newman (1905–1970) American artist

Source: 1940 - 1950, The Plasmic Image 2. 1943-1945, p. 125

“The human mind has a primitive ego defince mechanism that negates all realities that produce too much stress for the brain to handle. It's called denial.”

Dan Brown book Inferno

Variant: The human mind has a primitive ego defense mechanism that negates all realities that produce too much stress for the brain to handle. It’s called Denial.
Source: Inferno

“A primitive artist is an amateur whose work sells.”

Grandma Moses (1860–1961) American artist

As quoted in Grandma Moses, American Primitive : Forty Paintings (1947) by Otto Kallir

“There is always an unconscious collaboration among artists.... the artist who imagine himself a Robinson Crusoe is either a primitive or a fool.”

William Baziotes (1912–1963) American painter

from Baziote's text for a symposium in 1954; as quoted in William Baziotes – paintings and drawings, ed. Michael Preble, Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice, 2004, p. 18
1950s

“I follow the works of Iranian artists even now, sometimes in Paris or in New York and I am happy Iranian artists are still great. Whether they are men or women, they have always been great. Despite all the pressure and censorship inside the country, they haven't been able to stop the creativity of our artists. Some have to work underground, like in cinema, and sometimes their work has political messages, but the number of our artists now has definitely grown in comparison to the past.”

Farah Pahlavi (1938) Empress of Iran

Former queen of Iran on assembling Tehran's art collection http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/aug/01/queen-iran-art-collection, The Guardian, (August 1, 2012).
Interviews

“Detachment and involvement: the artist must have both. The link between them is compassion.”

Madeleine L'Engle (1918–2007) American writer

Section 1.16 
The Crosswicks Journal, A Circle of Quiet (1972)
Context: Detachment and involvement: the artist must have both. The link between them is compassion. It has taken me over fifty years to get a glimmer of what this means.