Sculptors

"The duty of the artist is not to be calculating in any sense, so that he may be free himself of human emotions while carried by the universal forces of life. Only then does one not think about making art, or about styles, or directions. Something comes about, something happens."

"Knowledge isolates phenomena and things to observe with.. ..nothing is isolatable or can be removed from its environment. Anything which becomes isolated ceases to exist. It is like the violent refusal of someone to play a game in which everyone cheats."

"The experience of the moment is what's important, and somehow the image, the 'thing' is left over."

"The true artist has no style. Style is an exterior decorative element. The true artist as servant of his matter, transcends it with an absolute freedom."

"Violence allows Appel to lose 'nothing' of the 'whole'; to stop his painting only after all the leaps of the act have crossed it."

"As I said, in the Fifties I had the 'angst' (= Dutch for 'fear') to survive materialistically. In the city Paris it was a battle. I painted with a knife and called the results 'human landscapes', abstract landscapes with human faces here and there. Today I can do without fight or struggle; every brushstroke now is ready, goes by itself: la peinture depouillé you could say. I discovered that in Picasso's late paintings. You look very closely but there is nothing anymore. He painted here and there a little bit; it is not finished, but once you step back you see a fantastic image, life by itself. I'm not fighting anymore; I'm floating, surfing on the wind."

"You can see the roughness of structure and the spots like wounds from battles on the canvas. The tops of skyscrapers with windows like eyes constantly remind you that there are laws surrounding the wastelands, and so you hide in the deep grass when you make love to a girl in dirty clothes, and experience how your nerves of seeing become stronger and stronger and every little sound more and more intense. That's what Pasolini's poetry is partly about; he was a street guy and therefore I avoided beautiful new wood or metal for his sculpture.. .The wasteland was Pasolini's other side; the boys, the knives, the nights, the tensions."

"One of my first sculptures was made of bicycle parts. I was living at that time in a attic in the red light section of Amsterdam. I started to work without any specific materials. I was looking in the street like when I was a young boy, in the garbage cans, for ropes, wires, and paint. I left my parents in 1940. Years later I saw an exhibition of Kurt Schwitters at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam curated by Willem Sandberg and there I saw the real 'objet trouvé'; until then I had never heard about it. Schwitters was a shattering experience."

"The wastelands belong to my youth [c. 1930's]. When I was young I played in the outskirts of the city - watching the cranes at the harbour. There was no law but garbage, grass and wildflowers like boys and girls, rough, hot and sexual and full of hidden pleasures. Life and death are overlapping in the wastelands like in my paintings."

"I'm not a pessimist. Maybe I don't have a primitive feeling of happiness, that is true. Sometimes my color is happy but not the expression."

"To keep it short and simple.. ..you take the subject, that is for example the wood, and the colour, the paint. You compose the subject, the realistic subject, you make a fantastic shape. For example, here, this is some wood, this is a table with a top and wooden flowers, you know, therefore I paint a [flowery] table, for example.."

"..because I live in Paris, but just outside Paris at the start of Yonne, I have a barn, a very, very big barn.. ..right near Auxerre, a barn forty meters long, six meters wide and fifteen meters high, and I do all my work there.. it's like a large street, you know."

"Our civilization is in a continuous state of self-repair. Maybe you have undergone surgery once. In former times you might have died. Today everybody can live on and on; everything around us is repaired, even the spirit. Look at the young artists. They only paint the facade and not the things hidden behind it. I don't say that life is lost its originality. I show straightforwardly the state of repair of civilization."

"..I believe, they always say to me that I'm an expressionist, I don't know why, because perhaps the technique is [not understood] and the colour is strong.. .But for some years, I work, I feel much more of, of the space, that is: magic is spacious if you like. Because for me man is an infinitely creative space. And because of that I am always looking to expand my work, you know, to find space."

"To paint is to destroy what preceded. I never try to make a painting, but a chunk of life. It is a scream; it is a night; it is like a child; it is a tiger behind bars."

"It's like this - you are in front of your canvas, you hand holds the paint, ready, raised. The canvas waits, waits, empty and white - but all the time it knows what it wants. So - what does it want, anyway? My hand comes near, my eyes begin to transform the waiting canvas; and when - with my hands holding the paint and my eyes seeing the forms - I touch the canvas, it trembles, it comes to life."

"My paint is like a rocket, which describes its own space. I try to make the impossible possible. What is happening I cannot foresee, it is a surprise. Painting, like passion, is an emotion full of truth and rings a living sound, like the roar coming from the lion's breast."

"The struggle begins, to harmonize canvas, eye, hand, forms. New apparitions stalk the earth."

"That is what he used to do, what he is doing now for the last hears. He is the only painter who paints like that.. ..like the wind, like the ocean, like the light, like the sunlight, like the moonlight, far away from everything, without any image.."

"..people always talk about painting, because basically painting does not talk."

"As an artist you have to fight and survive the wilderness to keep your creative freedom. Creativity is very fragile. It's like a leaf in the fall; it hangs and when it drops you don't know where it's drifting."

"The Cobra group started new, and first of all we threw away all these things we had known and started afresh, like a child — fresh and new. Sometimes my works look very childish, or childlike, schizophrenic or stupid, you know. But that was the good thing for me. Because, for me, the material is the paint itself. The paint expresses itself. In the mass of paint, I find my imagination and go on to paint it."

"When you get older as a painter and you've got the opportunities, the talent and the good fortune and have been provided with everything for getting old, then it's fantastic, because the same brushstroke that you put down is more mature and more poignant than it was when you were young."

"Willem de Kooning, they say, lost his memory. He lost his worldly memory. He lost the names of the people, he lost their faces.. .This is one of the reasons he paints as a real painter."

"..And his painting is like the wind, like a breeze blowing the paint across the canvas, so unreal, so loose and far away from the worldly life."

"[Appel] has to shatter, to infringe. It is his deployment. He is a solitary man with a staggering health. He leaves dreaming to matter."

"He is like an angel who floats for a little while on this planet and touches with his wings the canvas."

"When I was young I once found a book in a Dutch translation, The 'Leaves of Grass'. It was the first time a book touched me by its feeling of freedom and open spaces, the way the poet spoke of the ocean by describing a drop of water in his hand. Walt Whitman was offering the world an open hand (now we call it democracy) and my 'Monument for Walt Whitman' became this open hand with mirrors, so you can see inside yourself."

"Life ends with the previous thought It is resurrected with the subsequent One"

"Above all else, Franck was a bridge builder whose marvelous combination of art and spirituality points to a new way of being in the twenty-first century. He calls it transreligious: "outside the categories of both 'interfaith' and 'ecumenical' . . . even less a syncretistic scrambling together of symbols, concepts, and rituals of the various religious traditions." He clearly had great respect for each tradition and found in his art and writing ways to convey "the inner experience in which these traditions converge.""

""Nothing burns in hell but ego" says Tauler. Does anything live but Buddha Nature, Christ Spirit?"

"The cross of the Cruxifixion — without the cross of the Resurrection is the symbol of a mutilated Christianity."

"Even if there had never been a Buddha nor a Christ CHRIST NATURE IS! BUDDHA NATURE IS!"

"They do not see what they look at, hence they know not what they do."

"the grasses whisper "This is my Body""

"the distance between this pigeon's brain and mine is minute compared to that between mine and Bodhi's Wisdom Compassion"

"Innumerable Buddhas Enlightened… innumerable Christs crucified… always the same Christ, the same Buddha!"

"People walking? Karma walking … Buddha nature walking..!"

"If you still have to talk about Ultimate Reality See how it manifests itself nakedly in Every thing!"

"It is not that things are delusory but their separateness in the fabric of the Whole that is illusory…"

"In the beginngless beginning there was the Meaning"

"Do you believe in God? I, I believe in nothing but God!"

"Do you believe in God?" "Which one?"

"When the Christ says I: it is the I of all the Masters: the Way, the Truth, the Life"

"The religions are delusional constructs formed around an infallible core."

"The Tao cannot be divided, it cannot be shared"

"The clearsighted eye turns the light back to see its own Original Nature…"

"all at once I saw that the sun was round! Since then I have been the happiest man on Earth!"

""What are you?" — I am no What!I am only I … In relation to you!"

"The Void is a living void … pulsating in endless rhythms of creation and destruction. The great Void does not exist as Void, it embraces all Being/non-Being"