“It sometimes takes a foreigner to come and see a place and paint it. I remember someone saying they had never really noticed the palm trees here until I painted them.”

— David Hockney

Interview with Nigel Farndale, "The talented Mr. Hockney," The Telegraph, (15 November 2001)
2000s

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British artist 1937

Joan Mitchell (1925–1992) American painter

second side of the first tape
1975 - 1992, Oral history interview with Joan Mitchell, 1986

“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

“Do not say, "Draw the curtain that I may see the painting." The curtain is the painting.”

Nikos Kazantzakis book The Saviors of God

The Saviors of God (1923)
Context: "I do not know whether behind appearances there lives and moves a secret essence superior to me. Nor do I ask; I do not care. I create phenomena in swarms, and paint with a full palette a gigantic and gaudy curtain before the abyss. Do not say, "Draw the curtain that I may see the painting." The curtain is the painting.

“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 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

“I don't think of my work as calligraphic. Critics also describe Jackson and De Kooning as calligraphic painters but calligraphy has nothing to do with us. It's interesting that the Oriental critics never say this. The Oriental idea of space is an infinite space; it is not painted space, and ours is. In the first place, calligraphy is writing and I am not writing. People sometimes think I take a white canvas and paint a black sign on it, but this is not true. I paint the white as well as the black, and the white is just as important.”

Franz Kline (1910–1962) American painter

Quote, (1958)
1960's, Talks with Seventeen Artists, 1962

“I see the future development of painting taking place in workshops.... not in any holy temple of the arts. Painting is manual labor, no different from any other. It can be done well or poorly.”

George Grosz (1893–1959) German artist

Quoted by William Bolcom, in The End of the Mannerist Century / quoted in Art of the 20th Century, Part 1, Karl Ruhrberg, Klaus Honnef, Manfred Schneckenburger, Christiane Fricke; publisher: Taschen 2000, p. 190

“I got tired of other's people painting and began to make my own paintings. I found, however, that I not only got tired of looking at my own paintings but that I also didn't like painting them at all. The painterly problems of what to put here and there and how to do it to make it go with what was already there, became more and more difficult and the solutions more and more unsatisfactory. Until finally it became obvious that there had to be a better way.”

Frank Stella (1936) American artist

Source: Quotes, 1960 - 1970, The Pratt lecture (1960), p. 114

“I paint objects as I think them, not as I see them.”

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

“People sometimes think I take a white canvas and paint a black sign on it, but this is not true. I paint the white as well as the black and the white is just as important.”

Franz Kline (1910–1962) American painter

1950's, Conversations With Artists, 1957

“It sometimes takes a foreigner to come and see a place and paint it. I remember someone saying they had never really noticed the palm trees here until I painted them.”

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