Art Quotes

“What inspires their work is not new ideas, but their obsession with the idea that what has already been said is still not enough.”

“Nature is a dictionary; one draws words from it.”

“Do all the work you can; that is the whole philosophy of the good way of life.”

“The most important thing in a picture is that which cannot be explained.”

“Fantasy abandoned by reason produces impossible monsters; united with her, she is the mother of the arts and the origin of their marvels.”

“I have had three masters: Nature, Velázquez, and Rembrandt.”

“Painting, like poetry, selects in the universe whatever she deems most appropriate to her ends.”

“Always lines, never forms. But where do they find these lines in nature? I only see lighted forms and planes.”

“I paint flowers so they will not die.”

“I never paint dreams or nightmares. I paint my own reality.”

“Nothing is worth more than laughter. It is strength to laugh and to abandon oneself, to be light.”

“A little while ago, not much more than a few days ago, I was a child who went about in a world of colors, of hard and tangible forms. Everything was mysterious and something was hidden, guessing what it was was a game for me. If you knew how terrible it is to know suddenly, as if a bolt of lightning elucidated the earth. Now I live in a painful planet, transparent as ice; but it is as if I had learned everything at once in seconds.”

“I’m more and more convinced it’s only through communism that we can become human.”

“I drank because I wanted to drown my sorrows, but now the damned things have learned to swim.”

“I paint self-portraits because I am so often alone, because I am the person I know best.”

“I have suffered two grave accidents in my life, one in which a streetcar knocked me down... The other accident is Diego.”

“Since Trotsky came to Mexico I have understood his error. I was never a Trotskyist.”

“They thought I was a Surrealist, but I wasn't. I never painted dreams. I painted my own reality.”

“I am not sick. I am broken. But I am happy to be alive as long as I can paint.”

“Pies, para qué los quiero Si tengo alas para volar.”

“I hope the exit is joyful and I hope never to return.”

“It's true I'm here, and I'm just as strange as you.”

“A very common theme in [Kahlo's] work was fertility, fertility, fertility.. .In one painting, she draws pelvic bones. In another, a uterus is directly drawn. Another is showing the fetus. She's telling us what she's thinking about, but she never put her finger on what exactly was wrong.”

“The art of Frida Kahlo is a ribbon around a bomb.”

“If I were a painter, I'd be Frida Kahlo.”

“She painted what she painted because she had to, because she was passionate about it. She didn't care at all if people bought her paintings. As she said, she painted her reality.”

“I found I could say things with colour and shapes that I couldn't say any other way — things I had no words for.”

“To create one's world in any of the arts takes courage.”

“I said to myself, I have things in my head that are not like what anyone has taught me — shapes and ideas so near to me — so natural to my way of being and thinking.”

“Nobody sees a flower really; it is so small. We haven't time, and to see takes time.”