Richard Diebenkorn famous quotes

06-15-2025

I don't go into the studio with the idea of 'saying' something. What I do is face the blank canvas and put a few arbitrary marks on it that start me on some sort of dialogue.
-- Richard Diebenkorn

#Ideas #Arbitrary #Faces
If you get an image try to destroy it.
-- Richard Diebenkorn

#Imagination #Trying
Attempt what is not certain. Certainty may or may not come later. It may then be a valuable delusion.
-- Richard Diebenkorn

#May #Certain #Delusion
All paintings start out of a mood, out of a relationship with things or people, out of a complete visual impression
-- Richard Diebenkorn

#People #Painting #Mood
Mistakes can't be erased, but they move you from your present position.
-- Richard Diebenkorn

#Mistake #Moving #Position
In a successful painting everything is integral - all the parts belong to the whole. If you remove an aspect or element you are removing its wholeness.
-- Richard Diebenkorn

#Successful #Elements #Painting
My freedom will be so much the greater and more meaningful, the more narrowly I limit my field of action and the more I surround myself with obstacles.
-- Richard Diebenkorn

#Meaningful #Limits #Fields
I keep plastering it until it comes around to what I want, in terms of all I know and think about painting now, as well as in terms of the initial observation.
-- Richard Diebenkorn

#Thinking #Want #Painting
As a work progresses, its power to elicit and dictate response mounts. There seems to be an optimum moment when this power is at its greatest which just precedes the point where 'elicit' is no longer apt usage. 'Dictates' is the word for this condition and tyranny is the adversary.
-- Richard Diebenkorn

#Power #Progress #Moments
I would like the colors, their shapes and positions to be arrived at in response to and dictated by the condition of the total space at the time they are considered.
-- Richard Diebenkorn

#Space #Color #Shapes
Maybe the given person, cup, or landscape is lost before one gets to painting. A figure exerts a continuing and unspecified influence on a painting as the canvas develops. The represented forms are loaded with psychological feeling. It can't ever just be painting.
-- Richard Diebenkorn

#Feelings #Landscape #Cups
I trust the symbol that is arrived at in the making of the painting. Meaningful symbols aren't invented as such, they are made or discovered as symbol later.
-- Richard Diebenkorn

#Meaningful #Painting #Made
One wants to see the artifice of the thing as well as the subject.
-- Richard Diebenkorn

#Want #Wells #Subjects
When I am halfway there with a painting, it can occasionally be thrilling... But it happens very rarely; usually it's agony... I go to great pains to mask the agony. But the struggle is there. It's the invisible enemy.
-- Richard Diebenkorn

#Pain #Struggle #Agony
Don't be a Pollyanna!
-- Richard Diebenkorn

#Courage #Pollyanna
I have found in my still-life work that I seem to be able to tell what objects are important to me by what tends to stay in the painting as it develops.
-- Richard Diebenkorn

#Important #Able #Painting
My father didn't think being an artist was a respectable or worthy goal for a man. He hoped I would see my way to more serious work and would find myself turning towards medicine, law, or business.
-- Richard Diebenkorn

#Father #Men #Thinking
I came to mistrust my desire to explode the picture and supercharge it in some wayâ€¦ what is more important is a feeling of strength in reserve â€“ tension beneath calm.
-- Richard Diebenkorn

#Feelings #Desire #Important
I want painting to be difficult to do.
-- Richard Diebenkorn

#Want #Painting #Difficult
All paintings start out of a mood, out of a relationship with things or people, out of a complete visual impression. To call this expression abstract seems to me often to confuse the issue. Abstract means literally to draw from or separate. In this sense every artist is abstract . . . a realistic or non-objective approach makes no difference. The result is what counts.
-- Richard Diebenkorn

#Mean #Artist #Expression
My freedom consists in my moving about within the narrow frame that I have assigned myself for each one of my undertakings.
-- Richard Diebenkorn

#Moving
'Abstract' literally means to draw from or separate. In this sense every artist is abstract... a realistic or nonobjective approach makes no difference. The result is what counts.
-- Richard Diebenkorn

#Art #Mean #Differences
And I can just see that sometimes the technique is blasting powder rather than steady struggle.
-- Richard Diebenkorn

#Struggle #Technique #Sometimes

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