Walter Darby Bannard (September 23, 1934 – October 2, 2016) was an American abstract painter.
When you 'break all the barriers' you get a pile of rubble.
If we see an object as a bowl, it may inhibit seeing it as craft, just as seeing it as craft might inhibit seeing it as art. See first; name later.
Without the eye, the head is blind. Without the head, the eye is adrift.
To an art historian a Giotto is a 14th Century painting. To an artist it was painted yesterday. We free ourselves from the past when we see it freshly.
When you have made a good painting, don't do another like it, but remember the process, what you did, what you were thinking and feeling.
Making art is like swimming underwater in a blindfold.
Originality is way overrated. To make, you need to take. All great artists do.
Very few people ever understand art. If you are lucky, they will buy it for the wrong reasons.
Don't explain, enjoy.
Art makes you reinvent the wheel with regularity. If you don't, art gets bored and slips away.
The struggle to be original hates conformity, but the struggle to be better disregards it, or takes advantage of it to build workable conventions.
When you write something new about science, other scientists may not like it but they pay attention because it is subject to proof. When you write something new about art, it is subject only to the reader's discomfort, and will probably be rejected.
There's a big difference between grabbing attention and rewarding attention.
Experience is real. Painting, which comes out of experience, is real. The world is an illusion.
Stale artifacts of the past' are always 'active components of the present moment' when they are experienced in the present moment.
Art is not 'about. ' Art is.
Art is making something better without knowing what better is until you make it.
Art flows more easily when you are not thinking about what 'should' be in it or how it 'should' be done. The Impressionists taught us to look and see, not assume.
Power is like money. Some know how to get it; few know how to use it.
We must turn away from work that replaces experience and pleasure with explanation.