The Academies of Art are nothing but great painting factories - those with talent are fed in at one end and they come out as mechanical painting machines.
All art literature and music must be born in your heart's blood. Art is your heart's blood.
It was always my intention that The Frieze should be housed in a room which would provide a suitable architectural frame for it.
Sickness insanity and death were the angels that surrounded my cradle and they have followed me throughout my life.
Disease insanity and death were the angels that attended my cradle and since then have followed me throughout my life.
I donâ??t believe in an art that is not born out of manâ??s need to open his heart.
I do not believe in the art which is not the compulsive result of man's urge to open his heart
Just as Leonardo da Vinci studied human anatomy and dissected corpses so I try to dissect souls.
Without anxiety and illness I should have been like a ship without a rudder.
For as long as I can remember I have suffered from a deep feeling of anxiety which I have tried to express in my art.
Without fear and illness I could never have accomplished all I have
I should have considered it wrong to have finished the Frieze before the room for its accommodation and the funds for its completion were available.
Photography is an art which touches and grips one's own heart's blood.
In my art I have tried to explain to myself life and its meaning. I have also tried to help others to clarify their lives.
A work of art can only come from the interior of man. Art is the form of the image formed upon the nerves heart brain and eye of man.
This kind of painting with its large frames is a bourgeois drawing-room art. It is an art dealer's art-and that came in after the civil wars following the French Revolution.
A work of art comes only from inside a human being.
No longer shall I paint interiors with men reading and women knitting. I will paint living people who breathe and feel and suffer and love.
My art is rooted in a single reflection: why am I not as others are? ... my art gives meaning to my life.
Colors live a remarkable life of their own after they have been applied to the canvas.
The colors live a remarkable life of their own after they have been applied to the canvas.
I sense a scream passing through nature. I painted ... the clouds as actual blood. The colour shrieked.
I learned early about the misery and dangers of life and about the afterlife about the external punishment which awaited the children of sin in Hell.
Without fear and disease my life would be like a boat without oars.
The camera will never compete with the brush and palette until such time as photography can be taken to Heaven or Hell.
My breakthrough came very late in life really only starting when I was 50...I had the strength for new deeds and ideas.
Oil-painting is a developed technique. Why go backwards?
There is a battle that goes on between men and women. Many people call it love.
When I paint a person his enemies always find the portrait a good likeness.
A person himself believes that all the other portraits are good likenesses except the one of himself.
One can easily tell that the creator of the paintings in the Sistine Chapel was above all a sculptor
The viewers must come to understand the sacredness of painting so they will remove their hats as if they were in church.
Some colors reconcile themselves to one another others just clash.
In common with Michelangelo and Rembrandt I am more interested in the line its rise and fall than in color.
By painting colors and lines and forms seen in quickened mood I was seeking to make this mood vibrate as a phonograph does. This was the origin of the paintings in The Frieze of Life.
Death is pitch-dark but colors are light. To be a painter one must work with rays of light.
I painted the picture and in the colors the rhythm of the music quivers. I painted the colors I saw.
I build a kind of wall between myself and t he model so that I can paint in peace behind it. Otherwise she might say something that confuses and distracts me.
If what you want to paint is the emotive mood in all its strength... then you must not sit and stare at everything and depict it exactly as one sees it.
The way one sees is also dependent upon one's emotional state of mind. This is why a motif can be looked at in so many ways and this is what makes art so interesting.
From my rotting body flowers shall grow and I am in them and that is eternity.
The notes I have made are not a diary in the ordinary sense but partly lengthy records of my spiritual experiences and partly poems in prose.
My will exceeds my talents.
Nature is not only all that is visible to the eye... it also includes the inner pictures of the soul.
When I paint I never think of selling. People simply fail to understand that we paint in order to experiment and to develop ourselves as we strive for greater heights.
It is better to have a good painting with ten holes than ten bad paintings without any holes.
But can they [great works] get rid of the worm that lies gnawing at the roots of my heart? No never.
In my childhood I always felt that I was treated unjustly without a mother sick and with the threat of punishment in Hell hanging over my head.
I have no fear of photography as long as it cannot be used in heaven and in hell.
The rich man who gives steals twice over. First he steals the money and then the hearts of men.
I do not paint what I see but what I saw.
Art comes from joy and pain...But mostly from pain.
What is art? Art grows from joy and sorrow but mostly from sorrow. It grows from human lives.
Anybody who perceives colors can become a painter. It's simply a question of whether or not one has felt anything and whether one has the courage to recount the things one has felt.
Youth must go ahead and prosper. These young painters are all very talented people but they all paint frescoes.
And I would often wake up at night and stare widely into the room: Am I in Hell?