“It would be a sad thing for an artist if he knew how to paint. – so sad. An artist paints because it is a challenge to him – it is like trying to twist the devil. If you overcome it, there is no sport left. I don't even like to talk about painting. It is impossible to talk about painting because I don't know what it is. If I knew what it was I would get out a patent and then no one else would be able to paint.”

— Arshile Gorky

1942 - 1948, A Painter in a Glass House' (1948)

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Arshile Gorky 32

Armenian-American painter 1904–1948

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“It would be a sad thing for an artist if he knew how to paint.”

Arshile Gorky (1904–1948) Armenian-American painter

so sad. An artist paints because it is a challenge to him – it is like trying to twist the devil. If you overcome it, there is no sport left. I don't even like to talk about painting. It is impossible to talk about painting because I don't know what it is. If I knew what it was I would get out a patent and then no one else would be able to paint.
1942 - 1948, A Painter in a Glass House' (1948)

“What I always longed to do was to be able to paint like I can draw, most artists would tell you that, they would all like to paint like they can draw.”

David Hockney (1937) British artist

From a series of interviews with Marco Livingstone (April 22 - May 7, 1980 and July 6 - 7, 1980) quoted in Livingstone's David Hockney (1981), p. 207
1980s

“I can't say what they [his abstract paintings] are about. I don't think they are expressionistic. I don't know why people say that. Why not say they are like Chinese paintings or like batik? People also talk about the quality of light in the paintings. 'Ah, the light!' Or 'Ah, the space!”

Gerhard Richter (1932) German visual artist, born 1932

It's phony reverence. It's ridiculous.
after 2000, Gerhard Richter: An Artist Beyond Isms' (2002)

“I did not know how to paint or even what to paint, but I knew I had to begin.”

Margaret Atwood (1939) Canadian writer

Source: CAT'S EYE.

“Well, I first, uh, started doing this after World War II when I was kind of tramping around France, Germany, and the lowlands, and I came upon these frightened, waif-type children, and, uh, they actually looked like rats running around and they acted like it. And, uh, I started painting this type of thing of these chi—these children, they didn't even seem to know why—these children didn't even seem to know how to talk; they couldn't even pray. And it started like, uh, an artist work—it-it does—you don't know how to talk about it, but the painting can talk for you, and I think this is the difference between an artist and a poet and a writer: in other words, an artist, uh, paints what he has to say, where other people do it in, uh, in more verbal type of…”

Walter Keane (1915–2000) American plagiarist

Interviewed https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9WgStC6fvtM by Gary E. Park (circa 1964).
1964

“.. people always talk about painting, because basically painting does not talk.”

Karel Appel (1921–2006) Dutch painter, sculptor, and poet

Karel Appel defines his painting', interview 1968

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

Bram van Velde (1895–1981) Dutch painter

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“I make what it pleases me to make.... I have no ideas about what the paintings imply about the world. I don't think that's a painter's business. He just paints paintings without a conscious reason. I intuitively paint flags.”

Jasper Johns (1930) American artist

Quote of Jasper Johns, as cited in Trend to the Anti-Art: Targets and Flags, Newsweek 51 no. 13, March 1958, p. 96
1950s

“There's no indication or hint about the material world in my painting. No, I don't paint about the world. Everybody else is painting about the world. That's enough.”

Agnes Martin (1912–2004) American artist

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

“If you don't know what Ad Reinhardt's) paintings are about, you don't know what painting is about [after Reinhardt's death in 1967].”

Frank Stella (1936) American artist

Quote of 1967; as quoted in Abstract Expressionism, David Anfam, Thames and Hudson Ltd London, 1990
Quotes, 1960 - 1970

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