Joan Miro Quotes

The painting rises from the brushstrokes as a poem rises from the words. The meaning comes later.

You can look at a picture for a week and never think of it again. You can also look at the picture for a second and think of it all your life.

A simple line painted with the brush can lead to freedom and happiness.

More important than a work of art itself is what it will sow. Art can die, a painting can disappear. What counts is the seed.

Poetry and painting are done in the same way you make love; it's an exchange of blood, a total embrace - without caution, without any thought of protecting yourself.

To gain freedom is to gain simplicity.

If you have any notion of where you are going, you will never get anywhere.

When I stand before a canvas, I never know what I'll do, and I am the first one surprised at what comes out.

What I am seeking... is a motionless movement, something equivalent to what is called the eloquence of silence.

I think of my studio as a vegetable garden, where things follow their natural course. They grow, they ripen. You have to graft. You have to water.

For me an object is something living. This cigarette or this box of matches contains a secret life much more intense than that of certain human beings.

The more I work, the more I want to work.

Painting must be fertile. It must give birth to a world.. ..it must fertilize the imagination.

For me, a painting must give off sparks. It must dazzle like the beauty of a woman or a poem.

The more ignoble I find life, the more strongly I react by contradiction, in humour and in an outburst of liberty and expansion.

I make no distinction between poetry and painting.

The simplest things give me ideas.

I believe that to do anything in this world one needs a love for risk and adventure, and above all, to be able to do without what middle-class families call "future."

I start from something considered dead and arrive at a world. And when I put a title on it, it becomes even more alive.

As regards my means of expression, I try my hardest to achieve the maximum of clarity, power, and plastic aggressiveness; a physical sensation to begin with, followed up by an impact on the psyche.

Painting or poetry is made as one makes love - a total embrace, prudence thrown to the winds, nothing held back.

I begin my pictures under the effect of a shock which I feel and which makes me escape from reality... I need a point of departure, even if it's only a speck of dust or a flash of light.

I work like a gardener.

I feel the need of attaining the maximum of intensity with the minimum of means. It is this which has led me to give my painting a character of even greater bareness.

Throughout the time in which I am working on a canvas I can feel how I am beginning to love it, with that love which is born of slow comprehension.

Art class was like a religious ceremony to me. I would wash my hands carefully before touching paper or pencils. The instruments of work were sacred objects to me.

For me, a picture should be like sparks. It must dazzle like the beauty of a woman or a poem. It must have radiance; it must be like those stones which Pyrenean shepherds use to light their pipes.

The picture should be fecund. It must bring a world to birth.

I throw down the gauntlet to chance. For example, I prepare the ground for a picture by cleaning my brush over the canvas. Spilling a little turpentine can also be helpful.

My tendency towards bareness and simplification has been practiced in three fields: modeling, colors, and the figuration of the personages.

I want to assassinate painting.

That which interests me above all else is the calligraphy of a tree or the tiles of a roof, and I mean leaf by leaf, branch by branch, blade by blade of grass.