Sculptors

"Colour came into its own with papiers collés.. ..with these works we [Braque, and a little later Picasso, started to make 'collage art', circa 1912] succeeded in dissociating colour from form, in putting it on a footing independent of form, for that was the crux of the matter. Colour acts simultaneously with form, but has nothing to do with form."

"I started to introduce letters into my pictures [his first collage art]. These were forms which could not be deformed, because, being two-dimensional, they existed outside three-dimensional space; their inclusion in a picture allowed a distinction to be made between objects which were situated in space and those which belonged outside space [the letters]."

"Colour could give rise to sensations which would interfere with our [Braque & Picasso's, in the start of Cubism] conception of space."

"...when objects shattered into fragments appeared in my painting about 1909; this for me was a way of getting closest to the object.. .Fragmentation helped me to establish space and movement in space."

"What particularly attracted me [in his painting 'Still-life with Musical instruments', 1908 – 1909].. ..was the materialization of this new space that I felt to be in the offing. So I began to concentrate on still-life's, because in the still-life you have a tactile, I might almost say a manual space.. .This answered to the hankering I have always had to touch things and not merely see them. It was this space that particularly attracted me, for this was the first concern of Cubism, the investigation of space.. ..In tactile space you measure the distance separating you from the object, whereas in visual space you measure the distance separating things from each other. This is what led me, long ago, from landscape to still-life."

"One day I noticed that I could go on working art my motif no matter what the weather might be. I no longer needed the sun, for I took my light everywhere with me."

"I felt dissatisfied with traditional perspective. Merely a mechanical process, this perspective never conveys things in full. It starts from one viewpoint and never gets away from it. But the viewpoint is quite unimportant. It is though someone were to draw profiles all his life, leading people to think that a man has only one eye.. .When one got to thinking like that, everything changed, you cannot imagine how much!"

"We [ Picasso and Braque], were living in Montmartre, we saw each other every day.. ..We were like two mountaineers roped together."

"The painting is finished when it has erased the idea."

"What greatly attracted me – and it was the main line of advance of Cubism – was how to give material expression to this new space of which I had an inkling. So I began to paint chiefly still life's, because in nature there is a tactile, I would almost say a manual space. I wrote about this moreover 'When a still-life is no longer within reach, it ceases to be a still-life...'. For me that expressed the desire I have always had to touch a thing, not just to look at it. It was that space that attracted me strongly, for that was the earliest Cubist painting – the quest for space."

"Evidence exhausts the truth."

"Thanks to the oval I have discovered the meaning of the horizontal and the vertical."

"If we had never met Picasso, would Cubism have been what it is? I think not. The meeting with Picasso was a circumstance in our lives."

"In art progress does not consist in extension, but in the knowledge of limits."

"At that time I was very friendly with Picasso. Our temperaments were very different, but we had the same idea. Later on it became clear, Picasso is Spanish and I am French; as everyone knows that mean a lot of differences, but during those days the differences did not count... We were living in Montmartre, we used to meet every day, we used to talk.. .In those years Picasso and I said things to each other that nobody will ever say again, that nobody could say any more.. .It was rather like a pair of climbers roped together."

"The whole Renaissance tradition is antipathic to me. The hard-and-fast rules of perspective which it succeeded in imposing on art were a ghastly mistake which it has taken four centuries to redress; Cézanne and after him Picasso and myself can take a lot of credit for this.. ..scientific perspective forces the objects in a picture to disappear away from the beholder instead of bringing them within his reach as painting should."

"There are certain mysteries, certain secrets in my own work, which even I don't understand, nor do I try to do so.. ..Critics should help people see for themselves; they should never try to define things, or impose their own explanations, though I admit that if – as nearly always happens – a critic's explanations serve to increase the general obscurity that’s all to the good. French poets are particularly helpful in this respect."

"The only valid thing in art is that which cannot be explained. To explain away the mystery of a great painting – if such a feat were possible – would be irreparable harm.. .If there is no mystery then there is no 'poetry', the quality I value above all else in art. What do I mean by 'poetry'? It is to a painting what life is to man.. .For me it is a matter of harmony, of rapports, of rhythm and – most important for my own work – of 'metamorphosis'"

"I will try to explain what I mean by metamorphosis. For me no object can be tied down to any sort of reality. A stone may be part of a wall, a piece of sculpture, a lethal weapon, a pebble on a beach or anything else you like.. ..when you ask me whether a particular in one of my paintings depicts a woman's head, a fish, a vase, a bird, or all four at once, I can't give you a categorical answer, for this 'metamorphosic' confusion is fundamental to the poetry."

"I would say that it was 'poetry' which distinguishes the cubist paintings which Picasso and I arrived at intuitively from the lifeless sort of painting which those who followed us tried, with such unfortunate results, to arrive at theoretically."

"Take the birds which you'll have noticed in so many of my recent paintings. I never thought them up, they just materialized of their own accord, they were born on the canvas; that is why it is absurd to read any sort of symbolic significance into them."

"It is the act of painting, not the finished painting."

"You put a blob of yellow here, and another at the further edge of the canvas: straight away a rapport is established between them. Colour acts in the way that music does, if you like.. .There is more sensitivity in technique than in the rest of the picture."

"Picasso and I said things to each other during those particular years [c. 1908 -1913] that nobody would any longer know how to say, that nobody would be able to understand any.. ..things that would be incomprehensible, and which gave us so much pleasure."

"I started above all by producing still-lives because in nature there is a tactile space, I would say almost manual."

"I am always working on a number of canvases at one time, eight, ten.. ..I take years to finish them, but I look at them each day.. .You see the advantage of not working from real life – the apples would be rotten long before I completed my canvas.. .I find that it is important to work slowly. Anyone who looks at such a canvas will follow the same path the artist took, and he will experience that it is the path which counts more than the outcome of it, and that the route taken has been the most interesting part."

"To avoid a projection towards infinity I am interposing overlaid planes a short way off. To make it understood that things are in front of each other instead of being scattered in space."

"By using a white paint applied to the canvas I make a napkin. But I am sure the white shape is something conceived before knowing what it was to become. This means that a certain transformation has taken place.. .In a painting, what counts is the unexpected."

"Tactile space separates us from objects, as opposed to visual space, which separates objects from one another. I have spent my life trying to paint the former kind."

"You see, I have made a great discovery. I no longer believe in anything. Objects don't exist for me except in so far as a rapport exists between them or between them and myself. When one attains this harmony, one reaches a sort of intellectual non-existence — what I can only describe as a sense of peace, which makes everything possible and right. Life then becomes a perpetual revelation. That is true poetry."

"Whatever is valuable in painting is precisely what one is incapable of talking about."

"It is the limitation of means that determine style, gives rise to new forms and makes creativity possible."

"Whatever is in common is true; but likeness is false. Trouillebert's work bears a likeness to that of Corot, but they have nothing in common."

"Speaking purely for myself, I can say that it was my very acute feeling for the matière, for the substance of painting, which pushed me into thinking about the possibilities of the medium. I wanted to create a kind of substance by means of brush-work. But that is the kind of discovery which one makes gradually, though once a beginning had been made other discoveries follow. Thus it was that I subsequently began to introduce sand, sawdust and metal filings into my pictures. For I suddenly saw the extent to which colour is related to the substance.. .So my great delight was the 'material' character which I could give to my pictures by introducing these extraneous elements. In short, they provided me with a means of getting further away from idealism in 'representing' the things with which I was concerned."

"Art is polymorphic. A picture appears to each onlooker under a different guise."

"The painter thinks in terms of form and color. The goal is not to be concerned with the reconstitution of an anecdotal fact, but with constitution of a pictorial fact."

"The arts which achieve their effect through purity have never been arts that were good for everything. Greek sculpture (among others) with its decadence, teaches us this."

"One must beware of a formula good for everything, that will serve to interpret the other arts as well as reality, and that instead of creating will only produce a style, or rather a stylization."

"In art progress consists not in extension but in the knowledge of its limits."

"I couldn't portray a women in all her natural loveliness.. ..I haven't the skill. No one has. I must, therefore, create a new sort of beauty, the beauty that appears to me in terms of volume of line, of mass, of weight, and through that beauty interpret my subjective impression. Nature is mere a pretext for decorative composition, plus sentiment. It suggests emotion, and I translate that emotion into art. I want to express the absolute, not merely the factitious woman."

"Just go and feed yourselves on a wide array of products containing high-fructose corn sugar. Zheesh." "That wasn't funny, Evil Mark. It sounded fake and hollow. You're terrible at being ironic, and you've been rehearsing that line, haven't you?"

"In his (now deeply underrated) novel Generation X, Douglas Coupland sets the action against the background of a vast desert, mile after mile of emptiness, a hard stop, the ends of the earth. So hard, to feel trapped between having everything ahead of you and nowhere to go."

"Most know Coupland as the coiner of “Generation X,” a place-holder of a generational handle that we GenX’ers were too apathetic/jaded to swap out, thus proving the moniker’s point. But the Canadian Coupland is much more than that – he’s an artist, a prolific novelist, and has been a keen observer of what is happening to us for a good three decades."

"Life need not be a story, but it does need to be an adventure."

"Our curse as humans is that we are trapped in time; our curse is that we are forced to interpret life as a series of events — a story — and when we can’t figure out what our particular story is, we feel lost somehow."

"Unlike Rachel, Player One has a complete overview both of the world and of time. Player One’s life is more like a painting than it is a story. Player One can see everything with a glance and can change tenses at will. Player One has ultimate freedom, the ultimate software on the ultimate hardware. That realm is also the one place where Player One feels, for lack of a better word, normal."

"We have to count. I want to be part of history. I want a Wikipedia page. I want Google hits. I don’t want to be just a living organism that comes and goes and leaves no trace on this planet."

"Doug's Law: "You can have information or you can have a life, but you can't have both.""

"Why do most of us make such boring choices for the stories of our lives? How hard can it be to change gears and say, "You know what? Instead of inventing and telling stories, I’m going to make my life a more interesting story." (p. 177)"

"Being alive is just a brief technicality. (p. 167)"