Top 15 Bram van Velde Quotes

About Van Gogh.. a man who is on fire, a torch. His sincerity is absolute. His best painting is the grain field where he kills himself. There we find ourselves at the border of the art of painting. We cannot go further.

I feel myself tied to life. To the immensity and complexity of life. Each painting is an impulse towards life.

There is only the present. A painting is an instant of time that has escaped oblivion.

I think there is a degree of primitivism in what I do.. .You have to see without illusions. Without trying to protect yourself.

The greatest moment is when you realize that the painting you've just finished is nothing. When you manage to detach yourself from it.

Something is trying to come into the world. But I don’t know what it is. I never start by knowing. It's impossible to know. Truth is not knowledge.

Creating a painting is a matter of ensuring that all its parts achieve unity. Though it's a precarious, fragile unity.

What the eye can see won't get us very far. And what it can see is so limited, so restricted. But a gouache or an oil painting can be seen at a glance, can take in a whole world at a single glance.

Mondrian.. .The constructivists?.. .They had certainties. They wanted a stable basis to work on, but I’m afraid that that was enormous arrogance on their part. Nothing is stable and no certainties are possible.

I need to go towards the illogical. This world we live in destroys us. It is always governed by the same laws. You have to create images that don’t belong to it. That are totally different from those it presents us.

The world of architecture – and of works conceived for architecture – tends towards beauty. True beauty tends towards ugliness and panic.

Painting lives only through the slide towards the unknown in oneself.

I am in a thousand pieces. Painting somehow makes me whole.

When you are working, you are so far away and so absorbed, it's inevitable that you fall into a vacuum when you stop.. ..every time when I finish a painting, I always have to wait to get my strength back before I can begin another.

The real horror is mass production. Painting when there is no compulsion to do so… …Pictures like that are all unpunished crimes.