Joan Miro Quotes

I start from something considered dead and arrive at a world. And when I put a title on it, it becomes even more alive.

For me, a painting must give off sparks. It must dazzle like the beauty of a woman or a poem.

I think of my studio as a vegetable garden, where things follow their natural course. They grow, they ripen. You have to graft. You have to water.

I make no distinction between poetry and painting.

The more I work, the more I want to work.

Poetry and painting are done in the same way you make love; it's an exchange of blood, a total embrace - without caution, without any thought of protecting yourself.

What I am looking for ... is an immobile movement, something which would be the equivalent of what is called the eloquence of silence, or what St. John of the Cross, I think it was, described with the term 'mute music'.

Little by little, I've reached the stage of using only a small number of forms and colors. It's not the first time that painting has been done with a very narrow range of colors. The frescoes of the tenth century are painted like this. For me, they are magnificent things.

Throughout the time in which I am working on a canvas I can feel how I am beginning to love it, with that love which is born of slow comprehension.

I believe that to do anything in this world one needs a love for risk and adventure, and above all, to be able to do without what middle-class families call "future."

That which interests me above all else is the calligraphy of a tree or the tiles of a roof, and I mean leaf by leaf, branch by branch, blade by blade of grass.

To gain freedom is to gain simplicity.

Never, never do I set to work on a canvas in the state it comes in from the shop. I provoke accidents - a form, a splotch of color. Any accident is good enough. I let the matiere decide. Then I prepare a ground by, for example, wiping my brushes on the canvas. Letting fall some drops of turpentine on it would do just as well. If I want to make a drawing I crumple the sheet of paper or I wet it; the flowing water traces a line and this line may suggest what is to come next.

For me an object is something living. This cigarette or this box of matches contains a secret life much more intense than that of certain human beings.

A modeled form is less striking than one which is not. Modeling prevents shock and limits movement to the visual depth. Without modeling or chiaroscuro depth is limitless: movement can stretch to infinity.

What I will no longer accept is the mediocre life of a modest little gentleman.

When I stand before a canvas, I never know what I'll do, and I am the first one surprised at what comes out.

Art class was like a religious ceremony to me. I would wash my hands carefully before touching paper or pencils. The instruments of work were sacred objects to me.

My way is to seize an image the moment it has formed in my mind, to trap it as a bird and to pin it at once to canvas. Afterward I start to tame it, to master it. I bring it under control and I develop it.

My tendency towards bareness and simplification has been practiced in three fields: modeling, colors, and the figuration of the personages.

Painting must be fertile. It must give birth to a world ... it must fertilize the imagination.

What I am seeking ... is a motionless movement, something equivalent to what is called the eloquence of silence ...

The works must be conceived with fire in the soul but executed with clinical coolness.

I work like a labourer on a farm or in a vineyard. Things come to me slowly. My vocabulary of forms, for instance, has not been the discovery of a day. It took shape in spite of myself ... That is why I am always working on a hundred different things at the same time.

As regards my means of expression, I try my hardest to achieve the maximum of clarity, power, and plastic aggressiveness; a physical sensation to begin with, followed up by an impact on the psyche.

I begin painting and as I paint the picture begins to assert itself, or suggest itself, under my brush. The form becomes a sign for a woman or a bird as I work ... The first stage is free, unconscious ... the second stage is carefully calculated.

More important than a work of art itself is what it will sow. Art can die, a painting can disappear. What counts is the seed.

A simple line painted with the brush can lead to freedom and happiness.