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.
My whole life has been spent walking by the side of a bottomless chasm, jumping from stone to stone. Sometimes I try to leave my narrow path and join the swirling mainstream of life, but I always find myself drawn inexorably back towards the chasm's edge, and there I shall walk until the day I finally fall into the abyss.
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.
Colors live a remarkable life of their own after they have been applied to the canvas.
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
And I would often wake up at night and stare widely into the room: Am I in Hell?
It is better to have a good painting with ten holes than ten bad paintings without any holes.
The rich man who gives, steals twice over. First he steals the money and then the hearts of men.
Without fear and disease, my life would be like a boat without oars.
I was walking along the road with two friends. The sun set. I felt a tinge of melancholy. Suddenly the sky became a bloody red... I stood there, trembling with fright. And I felt a loud, unending scream piercing nature.
My breakthrough came very late in life, really only starting when I was 50...I had the strength for new deeds and ideas.
Some colors reconcile themselves to one another, others just clash.
I painted the picture, and in the colors the rhythm of the music quivers. I painted the colors I saw.
Photography is an art which touches and grips one's own heart's blood.
My father was temperamentally nervous and obsessively religious—to the point of psychoneurosis. From him I inherited the seeds of madness. The angels of fear, sorrow, and death stood by my side since the day I was born.
Certainly a chair can be just as interesting as a human being. But first the chair must be perceived by a human being... You should not paint the chair, but only what someone has felt about it.
The camera will never compete with the brush and the palette, until such time as photographs can be taken in Heaven or Hell.
I find it difficult to imagine an afterlife, such as Christians, or at any rate many religious people, conceive it, believing that the conversations with relatives and friends interrupted here on earth will be continued in the hereafter.
It would be quite amusing to preach a bit to all those people who for many years now have been looking at our paintings and either laughed or shook their heads reproachfully. They do not believe that these impressions, these instant sensations, could contain even the smallest grain of sanity. If a tree is red or blue, or a face is blue or green, they are sure that is insanity.
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.
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.
When I paint a person, his enemies always find the portrait a good likeness.
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.
I have no fear of photography as long as it cannot be used in heaven and in hell.
I have been given a unique role to play on this earth: given to me by a life filled with sickness, ill-starred circumstances and my profession as an artist. It is a life that contains nothing that resembles happiness, and moreover does not even desire happiness.
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