Otto Pacht
(1902-1988)

Where art is concerned, in the beginning was the eye not the word.

Gordon Parks
(1912-2006)

I saw that the camera could be a weapon against poverty, against racism, against all sorts of social wrongs.  I knew at that point I had to have a camera.  [1999 interview]

Grayson Perry

We're unhappy encountering artwork without knowing the "correct
interpretation" but we are all equally well qualified to say "Yuk or Wow."
[The Times 2006]

Pablo Picasso
(1881-1973)

Everyone wants to understand art.  Why not try to understand the song of a bird?  Why does one not love the night, flowers, everything around one without trying to understand them? But in the case of painting, people have to understand.

Pablo Picasso

In order to draw, you must close your eyes and sing.

Pablo Picasso

Today, as you know, I am famous, I am rich.  But when I am alone with myself, I haven't the courage to consider myself an artist in the ancient sense of the word.  Great painters are people like Giotto, Titian, Rembrandt, Goya.  I am only a public entertainer who has understood the times and has exploited as best he could the imbecility, the vanity and the greed of his contemporaries.  Mine is a bitter confession, more painful than might seem, but it has the merit if being sincere. [Said to the writer Giovanni Papini, 1952]

Pablo Picasso

Painting is just another way of keeping a diary.

Pablo Picasso

I paint objects as I think them, not as I see them.

Pablo Picasso

Those trying to explain pictures are as a rule completely wrong.  
[Quoted in Picasso on Art edited by Dora Ashton]

Pablo Picasso

The purpose of art is to wash from the soul the dust of daily life.

Pablo Picasso

Abstract art is only painting.

Pablo Picasso

Every child is an artist.  The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up.

Pablo Picasso

Through art we express our conception of what nature is not.

Pablo Picasso

When I was the age of these children I could draw like Raphael.  It took me many years to learn how to draw like these children.  [Said at an exhibition of children's art]

Pablo Picasso

You expect me to tell you what art is?  
If I knew, I would keep that knowledge to myself.

Pablo Picasso

Art is not a thing, it is a way.  

Camille Pissarro
(1830-1903)

It is a grave error to believe that all mediums of art are not closely connected to their time.

Camille Pissarro

Blessed are they who see beautiful things in humble places where other people see nothing.

Camille Pissarro

It is only by drawing often, drawing everything, drawing incessantly, that one day you discover to your surprise that you have rendered something in its true character.

Camille Pissarro

Do not define too closely the outline of things; it is the brush-stroke of the right value and color which should produce the drawing.

Camille Pissarro

Don't work bit by bit, but paint everything at once by placing tones everywhere.  Don't proceed according to rules and principles, but paint what you observe and feel.

Plotinus
(204-270)

Withdraw into yourself and look until you see perfect goodness.

Jackson Pollock
(1912-1956)

It seems to me that the modern painter cannot express this age, the airplane, the atom bomb, the radio, in the old forms of the Renaissance or any other past culture.  [1950 interview]

Jackson Pollock

My concern is with the rhythms of nature.  
[Jackson Pollock, B H Friedman, 1972]

Steve Prefontaine

Talent is a myth.  [In the 1998 biopic Without Limits]

Ezra Pound

Artists are the antennae of the race.  [1934]

Pierre-Joseph Proudon
(1809-1865)

To paint men in the sincerity of their natures and their habits, in their work. . . with their present day appearance, above all without pose. . . would seem to me to be the true departure for modern art - It is against the degrading theory of art for art's sake that Courbet protests. . . Art has the objective of leading us to knowledge of ourselves.  
[Treatise on Art, 1865]

Marcel Proust

Only through art can we emerge from ourselves and know what another 
person sees.