Abstract Painting Quotations

Abstract painting is abstract. It confronts you. There was a reviewer a while back who wrote that my pictures didn't have any beginning or any end. He didn't mean it as a compliment, but it was.

In every respect, fantasy is like doing abstract paintings.

I was worried in the '80s that the best abstract painting had become obsessed with materiality, and painterly gestures and materiality were up against the wall

When I used to do abstract paintings at school, like everyone else, the tutor said these would make great curtains. I would always neglect the formal stuff that was going on by using colour, because colour kind of came naturally to me.

Some manufacturers illustrate their advertisements with abstract paintings. I would only do this if I wished to conceal from the reader what I was advertising.

Abstract paintings must be as real as those created by the 16th century Italians.

Think of an abstract painting as very, very low relief - a thing, not a picture.

Abstract painting is dead. That's why it has become so interesting again.

Experience has proved that there is no difference between a so-called realist painting - of a landscape, for example - and an abstract painting. They both have more or less the same effect on the observer.

When I see people making 'abstract' painting, I think it's just a dialogue and a dialogue isn't enough. That is to say, there is you painting and this canvas. I think there has to be a third thing; it has to be a trialogue.

Abstract painting is abstract. It confronts you....

The freer the soul, the more abstract painting becomes.

I never had the... common anxiety as to whether abstract painting had a given 'meaning.