Probably my least favorite aspect of working with galleries and public institutions is the standard request for an ‘artists statement’, for many reasons. Not least because it assumes I have ‘something that I want to say’ and that my work is somehow the illustration of an idea that can also be communicated with words. It also assumes that I understand completely what it is that I am doing and what ‘the meaning’ of it is. But in my experience, most rationales tend to be attempts at justification that come after the fact of the work, rather than the other way around. It’s not that I don’t think about what I do. I do. My work has been on my mind to a greater or lesser degree, pretty much constantly, for as long as I can remember. Not that any of my thinking about it, outside of the making it, has really helped much, in fact it’s probably the opposite. Experience has taught me to think less and do more and also when I am not making or thinking about work, to be content with that and to focus on what it is I am supposed to be doing, eating, sleeping, walking etc.. I read a lot and often come across things that make sense to me in relation to what I do. I intend to post them here, not so much to explain what it is that I am doing, but more to give an insight into why I find it so hard to make ‘an artist’s statement’.
- David Quinn 2025
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To explain a work of art is a bad idea.
To be explained by a work of art is worse.
- Jamshid Mir Fenderesky
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The only solution for art to be appreciated by more people is what the Orientals have understood, especially in Japan. They are educated in sensitivity from birth to death, making them understand that they can raise the level and make a work of art out of eveything.
- Antoni Tàpies
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In general I am especially attracted to artists in whom I discover some common feathures between art and religion, when in their works one can recognise a sacred idea, a deep penetration. That's why I'm so passionate about the art of the Far East, and especailly the Buddhist art os the Chan or Zen branch.
- Antoni Tàpies
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Everything is a mystery, ourselves, and all things both simple and humble.
- Giorgio Morandi
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Things are not all so comprehensible and expressible as one would mostly have us believe; most events are inexpressible.
- Rainer Maria Rilke
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Everybody asks me what things mean in my films. This is terrible! An artist doesn’t have to answer for his meanings. I don’t think so deeply about my work — I don’t know what my symbols may represent. What matters to me is that they arouse feelings, any feelings you like, based on whatever your inner response might be. If you look for a meaning, you’ll miss everything that happens. Thinking during a film interferes with your experience of it. Take a watch to pieces, it doesn’t work. Similarly with a work of art, there’s no way it can be analyzed without destroying it.
- Andrei Tarkovsky
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It is not in the role of an artist to worry about life — to feel responsible for creating a better world. This is a very serious distraction. All of your conditioning has been directed toward intellectual living. This is useless in art work. All human knowedge is useless in art work. Concepts, relationships, categories, classifications, deductions are distractions of mind that we wish to hold free for inspiration …
The way of an artist is an entirely different way. It is a way of surrender. He must surrender to his own mind.- Agnes Martin
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I would like not to cut any new channels of consciousness but simply dig deeper into old ones that have become silted in with the debris of thoughts grown stale and platitudes too often repeated. "What's new?" is an interesting and broadening eternal question, but one which, if pursued exclusively, results only in an endless parade of trivia and fashion, the silt of tomorrow. I would like, instead, to be concerned with the question "What is best?," a question which cuts deeply rather than broadly, a question whose answers tend to move the silt downstream. There are eras of human history in which the channels of thought have been too deeply cut and no change was possible, and nothing new ever happened, and "best" was a matter of dogma, but that is not the situation now. Now the stream of our common consciousness seems to be obliterating its own banks, losing its central direction and purpose, flooding the lowlands, disconnecting and isolating the highlands and to no particular purpose other than the wasteful fulfillment of its own internal momentum. Some channel deepening seems called for.
from ' Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance'
- Robert Pirsig
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“I once told my wife I was going out to buy an envelope:
“Oh,” she said, "well, you're not a poor man. You know, why don't you go online and buy a hundred envelopes and put them in the closet?”
And so I pretended not to hear her. And went out to get an envelope because I have a hell of a good time in the process of buying one envelope.
I meet a lot of people. And see some great looking babies. And a fire engine goes by. And I give them the thumbs up. And I'll ask a woman what kind of dog that is. And, and I don't know.
The moral of the story is - we're here on Earth to fart around.
And, of course, the computers will do us out of that. And what the computer people don't realise, or they don't care, is we're dancing animals. You know, we love to move around. And it's like we're not supposed to dance at all anymore.
Let's all get up and move around a bit right now...or at least dance.”
- Kurt Vonnegut