Wayne Thiebaud quotes
Art quotes search by Author:

Join thousands of others and get the twice-weekly art letter.
Subscription is free.

Absolutely free, no strings. Sign up to the twice-weekly letter and join our art community.

art quotes

Wayne Thiebaud Quotes



Quotes by Wayne Thiebaud - (25 quotes)

Wayne Thiebaud - From the Abstraction category:

A conscious decision to eliminate certain details and include selective bits of personal experiences or perceptual nuances, gives the painting more of a multi-dimension than when it is done directly as a visual recording. This results in a kind of abstraction... and thus avoids the pitfalls of mere decoration. (Wayne Thiebaud)

Wayne Thiebaud - From the Achievement category:

Art means something very rare, an extraordinary achievement. (Wayne Thiebaud)

Wayne Thiebaud - From the Artists category:

An artist needs the best studio instruction, the most rigorous demands, and the toughest criticism in order to tune up his sensibilities. (Wayne Thiebaud)

Wayne Thiebaud - From the Brother/Sisterhood category:

Morandi suggests we are all single in this world, hoping for independent repose. But our best opportunity for a community of excellence depends upon a collection of enlightened individuals. (Wayne Thiebaud)

Wayne Thiebaud - From the Change category:

Commonplace objects are constantly changing... The pies, for example, we now see, are not going to be around forever. We are merely used to the idea that things do not change. (Wayne Thiebaud)

Wayne Thiebaud - From the Copying category:

If I don't have anything better to do that day, I'll copy paintings, generally by people who have some relationship to the work of the moment. (Wayne Thiebaud)

Wayne Thiebaud - From the Criticism category:

We all need critical confrontation of the fullest and most extreme kind that we can get. You can unnecessarily limit yourself by choosing your criticism... (Wayne Thiebaud)

Wayne Thiebaud - From the Critics category:

Diebenkorn was a very good critic, a very tough critic, tough on himself, tough on others. He expected the finest. (Wayne Thiebaud)

Wayne Thiebaud - From the Discipline category:

An artist has to train his responses more than other people do. He has to be as disciplined as a mathematician. Discipline is not a restriction but an aid to freedom. It prepares an artist to choose his own limitations... (Wayne Thiebaud)

Wayne Thiebaud - From the Education category:

As far as I'm concerned, there is only one study and that is the way in which things relate to one another. (Wayne Thiebaud)

Wayne Thiebaud - From the Effort category:

Art is not delivered like the morning paper; it has to be stolen from Mount Olympus. (Wayne Thiebaud)

Wayne Thiebaud - From the Humanity category:

The figures... are not supposed to reveal anything... It's like seeing a stranger in some place like an air terminal for the first time. You look at him, you notice his shoes, his suit, the pin in his lapel, but you don't have any particular feeling about him. (Wayne Thiebaud)

Wayne Thiebaud - From the Ideas category:

I'm a believer in the notion that artists who do good work believe in the ideas of extremes. (Wayne Thiebaud)

Wayne Thiebaud - From the Inexperience category:

I think of myself as a beginner. Sometimes that's the whole joy. If you could just do it, there'd be no point in doing it. (Wayne Thiebaud)

Wayne Thiebaud - From the Integrity category:

The most important thing is that the work has to be solid [in terms of its formal structure] and that the work accomplishes what it strives to achieve. It has to be genuine - not mannered or stylistically driven. (Wayne Thiebaud)

Wayne Thiebaud - From the Knowledge category:

If you stare at an object, as you do when you paint, there is no point at which you stop learning things from it. (Wayne Thiebaud)

Wayne Thiebaud - From the Manipulation category:

I'm not just interested in the pictorial aspects of the landscape – see a pretty place and try to paint it – but in some way to manage it, manipulate it, or see what I can turn it into. (Wayne Thiebaud)

Wayne Thiebaud - From the Mentors category:

Morandi gave an intimate view of his deepest thoughts. We watched him inquiring after the devilish questions of essences and substances. (Wayne Thiebaud)

Wayne Thiebaud - From the Nudes category:

-on drawing the nude...
It's the most important study there is and the most challenging and the most difficult. (Wayne Thiebaud)

Wayne Thiebaud - From the Painting category:

Painting is more important than art. (Wayne Thiebaud)

Wayne Thiebaud - From the Painting category:

When you think of painting as painting it is rather absurd. The real world is before us – glorious sunlight and activity and fresh air, and high speed motor cars and television, all the animation – a world apart from a little square of canvas that you smear paint on. (Wayne Thiebaud)

Wayne Thiebaud - From the Recognition category:

A painter is always overjoyed when anybody pays any attention to him at all, puts him in any category, calls him anything – as long as they call him something. (Wayne Thiebaud)

Wayne Thiebaud - From the Subject category:

I don't make a lot of distinctions between things like landscape or figure painting, because to me the problems are inherently the same – lighting, color, structure, and so on – certainly traditional and ordinary problems. (Wayne Thiebaud)

Wayne Thiebaud - From the Uniqueness category:

Common objects become strangely uncommon when removed from their context and ordinary ways of being seen. (Wayne Thiebaud)

Wayne Thiebaud - From the Words category:

Art is one of the dirtiest words in our language; it's mucked up with all kinds of meanings. There's the art of plumbing; there's the art of almost anything that you can say. (Wayne Thiebaud)