Romare Bearden Quotes

You should always respect what you are and your culture because if your art is going to mean anything, that is where it comes from.

When I conjure these memories, they are of the present to me, because after all, the artist is a kind of enchanter in time.

What I've attempted to do is establish a world through art in which the validity of my Negro experience could live and make its own logic.

The artist has to be something like a whale swimming with his mouth wide open, absorbing everything until he has what he really needs.

Black art has always existed. It just hasn't been looked for in the right places.

Art is the soul of a people.

The artist confronts chaos. The whole thing of art is, how do you organize chaos?

Sometimes the mind relives things very clearly for us...There are roads out of secret places within us along which we all must move as we go to touch others.

Painting is a self-disciplined activity that you have to learn by yourself.

You don't paint what you see, you paint what you feel.

My purpose is to paint the life of my people as I know it.

You put down one color and it calls for an answer. You have to look at it like a melody.

It was not my aim to paint about the Negro in America in terms of propaganda. It is to depict the life of my people as I know it, passionately and dispassionately as Brueghel.

If you're any kind of artist, you make a miraculous journey, and you come back and make some statements in shapes and colors of where you were.

The function of the artist is to organize the facets of life according to his imagination.

Painting is the act of discovery and you're constantly enlarging your horizon or finding yourself every time you paint.

Memory embellishes Life. Forgetfulness makes it possible.

I want to see how life can triumph.

The essence of art is to recapturel the fantasy and the imagination of a child again, but without the innocence of a child.

The most difficult object in painting is yourself because you're always at issue

The artist has to be exactly the opposite [of people singing the song, I've gotta be Me,] and transcend himself as he makes judgements.