“It's more like I'm having an experience than making a picture. So I've never had anyone around. I never have. People are different, but I have to really be with no interference. And it takes me hours. Painting a picture is a very short thing if it goes well, but the sitting and thinking... I usually go off on stories that have nothing to do with the painting, and sometimes I sit in the opposite room to where I work. If I can get a good hot story I can paint better, but sometimes I'm not thinking about the painting, I'm thinking about the subject. Lots of times I'll sit in another room and then I might just go in. It takes a lot of freedom. I'm working for two years on a subject now: ten paintings, and that can carry on for two years. I worked last summer and I started this summer and with just the simplest motif I just can't seem to do it. And everything slowed down.”

— Cy Twombly

Source: 2000 - 2011, Cy Twombly, 2000', by David Sylvester (June 2000), pp. 179-180

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Cy Twombly 18

American painter 1928–2011

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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

“When I have to think about it, I know the picture is wrong. And sizing is a form of thinking and coloring is too. My instinct about painting says, 'If you don’t think about it, it's right'. As soon as you have to decide and choose, it's wrong. And the more you decide about, the more wrong it gets. Some people, they paint abstract, so they sit there thinking about it because their thinking makes them feel they're doing something. But my thinking never makes me feel I'm doing anything.”

Andy Warhol (1928–1987) American artist

Source: 1975, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (1975), p. 149

“… as a matter of fact it is nice to paint a happy picture after a sad one. I think there is a kind of loneliness in a lot of them which I don't think about as the fact that I'm lonely and therefore I paint lonely pictures, but I like kind of lonely things anyhow; so if the forms express that to me, there is a certain excitement that I have about that.... What I try to do is to create the painting so that the overall thing has the particular emotion; not just the forms in it.... in other words, there's a particular static or heavy form that can have a look to it, an experience that translated through the form; so then it does have a mood. And when that is there, well then it becomes it becomes a painting whereas all the other pictures that have far more interesting shapes and so on, don't become that to me.”

Franz Kline (1910–1962) American painter

n.p.
1960's, Living Art, 1963

“To me, Pollock is the height of American painting. It's very lyrical. Gorky, who is very passionate, can copy a drawing or take a drawing and copy it exactly as a painting, and Miro can too, it's amazing. Miro can do a drawing to paint and that's another training in a sense. So there's a certain mannerism that comes in both of them [three], and probably everything becomes obvious in time. But I don't have that. The line is illustrated or the colour. I'm sure it has great feeling when they're doing it, but it's more towards defining something. It has a certain clarity because it's a complex thing. I'm a painter and my whole balance is not having to think about things. So all I think about is painting. It's the instinct for the placement where all that happens. I don't have to think about it. So I don't think of composition; I don’t think of colour here and there. Sometimes I alter something after. So all I could think is the rush... I cannot make a picture unless everything is working. It's like a state.”

Cy Twombly (1928–2011) American painter

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

“I usually let them [his drawings] lies around for a long time. I have to get to really like it. And then when I do the painting I have to get to like that too. Sometimes I stay with the sketch, sometimes I follow the original idea exactly if the idea is solved. But most of the time there have to be adjustments during the painting. Through the painting of it I find the color and I work the form and play with it and it adjusts itself.”

Ellsworth Kelly (1923–2015) American painter, sculptor, and printmaker

In an interview by Henry Geldzahler, 'Art International 1.', February 1964, p. 48
1950 - 1968

“I don't feel any direct relationship between what I do and existing art. Though there is unavoidable progression: the things all paintings have in common are paint, and color, and some means of application. With the standard you can make any two pictures appear either alike of different. I don't think whether they're alike or different is really very interesting.”

Robert Rauschenberg (1925–2008) American artist

1950's, Is today's artist with or against the past, (1958)

“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 do not have a comic or tragic period in any real sense. I have always painted dark pictures; always some light pictures. I will probably go on doing so... Orchestral. My work in its entirety is like a symphony in which each painting has its part.”

Clyfford Still (1904–1980) American artist

Gallery Notes, Allbright-Knox Art Gallery, Vol. 24 summer 1961 pp. 9-14; as quoted in Abstract Expressionism Creators and Critics, edited by Clifford Ross, Abrams Publishers New York 1990, p. 197
1960s

“I paint very large pictures. I realize that historically the function of painting large pictures is painting something very grandiose and pompous. The reason I paint them however, - I think it applies to other painters I know -, is precisely because I want to be very intimate and human. To paint a small picture is to place yourself outside your experience, to look upon an experience as a stereopticon view or with a reducing glass. However you paint the larger picture, you are in it. It isn't something you command.”

Mark Rothko (1903–1970) American painter

1950's
Source: Interiors, Vol. 110, no 10, May 1951; as quoted in Abstract Expressionism Creators and Critics, ed. Clifford Ross, Abrams Publishers New York 1990, p. 172

“Now I think I'm going down to the well tonight
And I'm going to drink till I get my fill.
And I hope when I get old I don't sit around thinking about it,
But I probably will.
Yeah, just sitting back trying to recapture
A little of the glory of,
Well time slips away and leaves you with nothing mister but boring stories of glory days.”

Bruce Springsteen (1949) American singer and songwriter

"Glory Days"
Song lyrics, Born in the U.S.A. (1984)

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