Me sitting down for dinner with Ingmar Bergman felt like a house painter sitting down with Picasso.
I'm a painter. I'm still a painter and I will die a painter. Everything that I have developed has to do with extending visual principles off the canvas.
The great painter has something to say. He does not paint men, landscapes, or furniture; but an idea.
My friends tend to be writers. I think writers and painters are really all the same-we just sit in our rooms.
Gardening was something I learned in my youth when I was unhappy. I perhaps owe having become a painter to flowers.
The painter doesn't try to reproduce the scene before him. . . he simplifies and eliminates until he knows exactly what stirred him, sets this down in color and line as simply and as powerfully as possible and so translates his impression into an aesthetic emotion.
What is a portrait good for, unless it shows just how the subject was seen by the painter? In the old days before photography came in a sitter had a perfect right to say to the artist: "Paint me just as I am. " Now if he wishes absolute fidelity he can go to the photographer and get it.
There has never been a boy painter, nor can there be. The art requires a long apprenticeship, being mechanical, as well as intellectual.
Were it not for this [dissatisfaction], the perfect painting might be painted, on the completion of which the painter could retire. It is this great insufficiency that drives him on. The process of creation becomes necessary to the painter perhaps more than it is in the picture. The process is in fact habit-forming.
A poet can feel free, in my estimation, to write a poem for himself. Or a painter can paint a painting for himself. You can write a short story for yourself. But for me, comedy by its nature is communal. If other people don't get it, I'm not sure why you are doing it.
The ability to name poetry's gestures and rhetorics isn't required to write or read them, any more than a painter needs to know the physics of color to bring forward a landscape. The eye and hand and ear know what they need to know. Some of us want to know more, because knowing pleases.
Planning is design. As a designer what I tend to do, and what's different from being a painter, is that I interact with other people, and the people have things they need to have happen.
I know if I did that [career as painter] all the time I would get tired of it.
I do feel that both visual artists and writers look out at the world in a similar way, and wonder at what they see. They want to record the visual world in their own, distinctive ways. We could call it "attention to detail," which also makes a good carpenter, for instance. To be what Emerson called the "transparent eyeball" (which is a phrase that makes me a little queasy) is a noble quest, I feel. It's a quest for honesty, and as Frost put it, a momentary stay against confusion. If I had more talent and courage, I would still love to be a painter.
Many a painter has lived in affluence, in high esteem, who lacked the divine spark, and who is utterly forgotten to-day.
To be a painter now is to be part of a very small, endangered species.
The painter has to unlearn the habit of thinking that things seem to have the color which common sense says they 'really' have, and to learn the habit of seeing things as they appear.
Many have genius, but, wanting art, are forever dumb. The two must go together to form the great poet, painter, or sculptor.
A good painter has two main objects to paint, man and the intention of his soul. The former is easy, the latter hard as he has to represent it by the attitude and movement of the limbs.
You have understood what all great painters understand: in order to forget the rules, you must know them and respect them.