Walter Darby Bannard Quotes
The struggle to be original hates conformity, but the struggle to be better disregards it, or takes advantage of it to build workable conventions.
In art there is no absolute good or bad, but it is absolute that there is good and bad.
Trying to be original is futile. If you have no place to go, stay home and cook.
Good art has everything you need to know about it in the work, not on a wall label. Art is here to take us beyond language.
If you learn something too well, it will get in the way of your perception of reality.
Craft' gets a bad rap. Mediocre art is not caused by craft; it is caused by artists. Good art employs whatever craft works best.
Art makes you reinvent the wheel with regularity. If you don't, art gets bored and slips away.
Whether something is called art is beside the point. What counts is what happens when you ask it to actually be art.
Art may be for the privileged few but they have earned the privilege and deny it to no one.
We must turn away from work that replaces experience and pleasure with explanation.
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.
Great art does not break with the past. It breaks with the present by emulating the best of the past.
Experience is real. Painting, which comes out of experience, is real. The world is an illusion.
Purplish brown? Let's agree it / is a color so bad we all flee it / it has no good use / so let's name it Puce / from the sound we make when we see it.
Very few people ever understand art. If you are lucky, they will buy it for the wrong reasons.
Good art, no matter how simple or casual-seeming, always carries a high density of choice.
When anyone can produce dreck or publish gibberish, and not only get away with it but be celebrated for it, the discipline is no longer a discipline, and it will get no respect.
Postmodernism does not facilitate better art. It rationalizes inferior art by wrapping it in words - a suit of armor with nobody inside.
It matters little if something is 'craft' or 'art.' The question is only this: does it give me pleasure?
Start a painting with fresh ideas, and then let the painting replace your ideas with its ideas.
In ART as in Life the Best Way to REMEDY mistakes is to take advantage of them.
When realistic images or patterns are seen in an abstract painting, they are often parallels brought about by processes in painting which echo processes in nature.
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.
If art depended on content, then one painting of an apple would be as good as the next one.
The power of art is not in communication but effect; what it does, not what it relates.
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.
Conceptual art' is an oxymoron. Concepts are articulations of fact or supposition, not attributes of quality.
