“I was like a gravedigger while I painted these corpses [of the dead Baader-Meinhoff members]. It was just work. If I felt one of them looked too theatrical, I painted over it… I was afraid more of the reaction on the left than the right. It was still very dangerous to deal with this subject in Germany. There was fear that the museum where I showed them might be bombed. All my friends were on the left, but I was not. They said: 'Someone with the right mentality could do this, but not Richter - he is too bourgeois. He steals Baader-Meinhof away from us.' To me, they were part of the problem. I was standing outside watching how people, on both sides [left / right], ignored the truth because of their beliefs, beliefs that made them crazy. That was the point of the pictures.”

— Gerhard Richter

In 1988, Richter painted a series of 15 works titled 'October 18, 1977.' It shocked Germany, especially left. The series was based on photographs of the anti-capitalist Baader-Meinhof group, which called itself the Rote Armee Fraktion (Red Army Fraction) and were in prison and died in 1977.
after 2000, Gerhard Richter: An Artist Beyond Isms' (2002)

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Gerhard Richter 96

German visual artist, born 1932 1932

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“.. you see they hung my painting here [on her show 'Wind', 2009] I did that in the early 1990s. People never really liked them so much back then, they thought they looked more like photographs. Actually, I was doing them when I was still married to Gerhard Richter [till 1993], and it was somehow in relation to what he was doing, you know, these kind of side-to-side gestural abstracts – done like this [gestures as if pulling a squeegee over a surface from one side to the other] like paintings of the 1950s. Mine were called 'Basic Research', they were rubbings of oil paint on canvas – frottages of the floor of my studio. I did quite a few of these. [Gerhard] Richter put one up in his studio for some time... But he found it too hard and then took it out after a while.”

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“I've painted for a very long time, but I don't get tired or bored by it; I love to do it. If I don't paint one day, I don't feel well physically or mentally. My eyes bother me when I don't paint. But when I paint a full day, I feel satisfied and everything seems to be OK. I would never stop, never retire. I don't see how people can retire; I don't understand that. My brother Moses died while he was painting. He was actually working on a painting, and the last words he said were to the model: "Phoebe, don't frown."”

Raphael Soyer (1899–1987) American artist

Then he died. He worked to the very last minute.
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“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

“Personally I would like to have pupils, a studio, pass on my love to them, work with them, without teaching them anything... A convent, a monastery, a phalanstery of painting where one could train together.... but no program, no instruction in painting.... drawing is still alright, it doesn't count, but painting – the way to learn is to look at the masters, above all at nature, and to watch other people painting..”

Paul Cézanne (1839–1906) French painter

Source: Quotes of Paul Cezanne, after 1900, Cézanne, - a Memoir with Conversations, (1897 - 1906), p. 124, in: 'What I know or have seen of his life'

“To achieve the structure it takes a damn long time, so my paintings are always in work for a very long time—sometimes a year. Not that I work on them every day. I will have them, and then come back to them after a year, and also return intermittently. It’s not easily done. I am not able to do “one, two, a painting.” I try to do it very quickly, but it doesn’t work with me. I simply can’t do it. Very often people look and say, 'Ah, fantastic! That’s a beautiful painting.'”

Per Kirkeby (1938–2018) Danish artist

But the moment they are out the door I start working on it. I rework it.
In a talk with Kosinski, before 'Per Kirkeby at the Phillips', in The Phillips Collection, Washington D.C. January, 2013
Kirkeby spoke to exhibition co-curator Dorothy Kosinski about the necessity of time in the development of a painting.
1995 and later

“I do both: I make preliminary drawings, other times I paint directly, other times I start a painting and then paint it out so that it becomes another painting or nothing at all. If a painting doesn't work, throw it out. When I work from preliminary sketches, I don't just enlarge these drawings, but plan my areas in a large painting by using small drawings for separate areas. I combine them in a final painting, often adding to or subtracting from the original sketches.... There are certain canvases here in my studio - the little one over there – that I've worked on for a good six months – painting most of it out and then painting it over and over again. I think I've got it now.”

Franz Kline (1910–1962) American painter

1958
1960's, Talks with Seventeen Artists, 1962

“I used to look in my mind for the unwritten page
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But I realized what I liked was the horizontal line
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Agnes Martin (1912–2004) American artist

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“I deal with painting as I deal with things, I paint a window just as I look out of a window. If an open window looks wrong in a picture, I draw the curtain and shut it, just as I would in my own room. In painting, as in life, you must act directly.”

Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) Spanish painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist, and stage designer

Herschel Browning Chip (1968, p. 271).
1930s, "Conversations avec Picasso," 1934–35

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