Helen Frankenthaler Quotes
There are no rules. That is how art is born, how breakthroughs happen. Go against the rules or ignore the rules. That is what invention is about.
Art has a will of its own. It has nothing to do with the taste of the moment or what's expected of you. That's a formula for dead art, or fashionable art.
You have to know how to use the accident, how to recognise it, how to control it, and ways to eliminate it so that the whole surface looks felt and born all at once.
In relations with people, as in art, if you always stick to style, manners, and what will work, and you're never caught off guard, then some beautiful experiences never happen.
What concerns me when I work, is not whether the picture is a landscape, or whether it's pastoral, or whether somebody will see a sunset in it. What concerns me is - did I make a beautiful picture?
I had the landscape in my arms as I painted it. I had the landscape in my mind and shoulder and wrist.
A picture that is beautiful, or that comes off, or that works, looks as if it was all made at one stroke.
A really good picture looks as if it's happened at once. It's an immediate image.
One really beautiful wrist motion, that is synchronized with your head and heart, and you have it. It looks as if it were born in a minute.
Whatever the medium, there is the difficulty, challenge, fascination and often productive clumsiness of learning a new method: the wonderful puzzles and problems of translating with new materials.
I have always been concerned with painting that simultaneously insists on a flat surface and then denies it.
I've explored a variety of directions and themes over the years. But I think in my painting you can see the signature of one artist, the work of one wrist.
We would sift through every inch of what it was that worked, or if it didn't, and wonder what was effective in it, in terms of paint, the subject matter, the size, the drawing.
