Arshile Gorky Quotes

Rimbaud has epitomized for me the true function of the artist when he wrote: 'The poet should define the quantity of the unknown which awakes in his time, in the universal soul. He should give more than the formula of his thought, than the annotation of his march toward progress. The enormous becoming the normal, when absorbed by everyone, he would really be a multiplication of progress.'

When I feel tired and discouraged and I lie down on the sofa, then I think of the simplest thing I can – a piece of string – and I go in it and paint it. That's the way to keep painting – to create something inside that makes you want to recreate it.

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. [quote of 1948]

It is true – is it not – that even Ingres [French classical painter, famous for his line] had to revise – yes, the surface of the painting is smooth, finished and incorruptible as a diamond, but under the accomplished surface are pentimenti – see there at the shoulder, how the line of the black dress was lowered qua fraction and the hand was extended to give greater elegance.. .Are these not signs of the patient revision that even a genius has to make.

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.

..poor art for poor people [his critic on social realism art in America]

Subject.. ..no specific scene but many incidents. – The first word I spoke was Argula – it has no meaning. I was then five years old. Thus I called this painting 'Argula' as I was entering a new period closer to my instincts.
(Technique..:) Hundreds and hundreds of layers of paint to obtain the weight of reality – Art this period I measured by weight. [mid 1930's]

[speaking about a Persian rug...] how modern their conception of space was! They understood it in the seventeenth century; we are only just beginning to re-understand it in the twentieth – see how they mesh the vines, the tendrils, the flowers with space and utilize these linked forms to create wholeness and radiance.

The oldest girl [his daughter Maro, four and a half years old] did this. She paints like a little bird. And this, the young one [Natasha, two and a half] did. See, she paints on both sides of the canvas. She is more like a passionate plumber. I wish I could paint as freely as they do. There is a gravity of playfulness in their work. If they could only keep it – but they will lose it as they grow older.

My sweet, I do not mean to upset you in writing this, but I want to tell you that within us, as within the nature of every person's soul there is an emptiness and we constantly seek to find that and those in order to escape from being alone. This always has been so, and always the weight of loneliness is with us, and for this reason we think of this thing or that so as not to be left alone.

The stuff of thought is the seed of the artist. Dreams form the bristles of the artist's brush. As the eye functions as the brain's sentry, I communicate my innermost perceptions through the art, my worldview.

That's the way beauty is found, by accident [referring to the Glass house he lived in, with the family]. You don't recognize it when you are looking for it, and you won't find it by looking in a magazine. It's right here in the moon, the stars, the horizon, the snow formations.. .In this house we can see all those things. But what I miss are the songs in the fields. No one sings them any more because everyone has become a little businessman. And there are no more plows. I love a plow more than anything else on a farm.

Movement is the translation of life, and if art depicts life, movement should come into art, since we are only aware of living because it moves.

Stuart Davis.. ..is one of but few, who realized his canvas as a.. ..two-dimensional surface plane.

Yes, Johannes Vermeer [Dutch 17th century master painter] paints in thin layers – there is no waste effort – and those small dots – no, they are not like Seurat's, though they contain all the light the pointillist may have wished for, concentrated, hovering before the object, but not obliterating it.. .Vermeer is not a sun painter, but rather a moon-painter – like Uccello – that's good, it is the pure, final stage of art, the moment when it becomes more real than reality.