Caio Fonseca Quotes

So many paintings have hidden meanings or need wall texts, but my work is not in that category.

It's not until the very last phase that you know how good the works are going to be.

My forms are not abstractions of things in the real world. They're also not symbols. I would say that my job is to invent these forms and to put them together in a way that keeps your interest, to give the forms a quirky identity so you can engage with them, so you realize there's an inner intelligence or logic.

Most days, I practice piano in the mornings and I spend the rest of the day painting.

I think I was very lucky to have grown up with an artist's studio in the house. It was a kind of life that was possible. Yeah, it made it kind of harder because the standards were higher, but there was no pressure.

I try not to bring in anything I don't love looking at. It's about restaint ... There is something about an unfinished quality that leaves within you that sense of possibility.

I'm not such an artist type that I can't handle the real world. I read the financial pages, because most people don't talk about art.

Most people draw from the mind, not the eye. They draw the idea of a table or a face, not what's in front of them. We don't actually see the line of the jaw as a line and we don't see an eye as a perfectly outlined almond shape.

If you come every day or every month to my studio, you won't see that much change, but if you come once a year, you'll see big new categories opened up.

The world of painting has nothing to do with the art world.

I've been playing piano my whole life, but I'd never tried to understand how compositions are made, really. Try to imagine if you'd loved paintings your whole life but had never painted one. My aspiration now is just to understand.

All my siblings became artists. One's a novelist, my brother is a painter, my sister was a costume designer.