Robert Rauschenberg Quotes

But I was in awe of the painters; I mean I was new in New York, and I thought the painting that was going on here was just unbelievable.

I don't think any one person, whether artist or not, has been given permission by anyone to put the responsibility of the way things are on anyone else.

It's when you've found out how to do certain things, that it's time to stop doing them, because what's missing is that you're not including the risk.

I feel strong in my belief, based on my widely traveled collaborations, that a one-to-one contact through art contains potent peaceful powers, and is the most non-elitist way to share information, hopefully seducing us into creating mutual understandings for the benefit of all.

The working process is ideally freeing my mind.

If I declare it to be so, then this is a portrait.

You begin with the possibilities of the material.

I really feel sorry for people who think things like soap dishes or mirrors or Coke bottles are ugly, because they're surrounded by things like that all day long, and it must make them miserable.

Anything you do will be an abuse of somebody else's aesthetics. I think you're born an artist or not. I couldn't have learned it. And I hope I never do because knowing more only encourages your limitations.

I'm quite taken aback when I get something that appears to be technically a good photograph, because it's not necessarily my intention.

I prefer images that are less specific, so there is room for everyone's imagination.

A canvas is never empty.

An empty canvas is full only if you want it to be full.

I don't think of myself as making art. I do what I do because I want to, because painting is the best way I've found to get along with myself.

You have to have time to be sorry for yourself to be a good Abstract Expressionist.

I've not been cursed with talent, which could be a great inhibitor.

I feel as though the world is a friendly boy walking along in the sun.

I never allowed myself the luxury of those brilliant, beautiful colors until I went to India and saw people walking around in them or dragging them in the mud. I realised they were not so artificial.

I usually work in a direction until I know how to do it, then I stop, At the time that I am bored or understand - I use those words interchangeably - another appetite has formed. A lot of people try to think up ideas. I'm not one. I'd rather accept the irresistible possibilities of what I can't ignore.

A pair of stockings is no less suitable o make a painting of than wood,nails,turpentine,oil,and fabric.

And also the new excitement and variety of ways that the abstract expressionists were applying paint. You could put it on as though it were colored air and it would be painting.

Most artists try to break your heart, or they accidentally break their own hearts.But I find the quietness in the ordinary much more satisfying.

Work is my joy ... Work is my therapy, I don't know anybody who loves work as much as I do.

And all of this, all these physical aspects of painting at that time excited me very much. You could do a picture in just black and white. I mean all the things, whether you're soliciting permission or not, do give you permission.

Oracle was I had started it I guess two and a half years ago, maybe even longer than that, closer to three.

There was a whole language that I could never make function for myself in relationship to painting and that was attitudes like tortured, struggle, pain.

You can't make either life or art, you have to work in the hole in between, which is undefined. That's what makes the adventure of painting.

Having to be different is the same trap as having to be the same.

I always have a good reason for taking something out but I never have one for putting something in. And I don't want to, because that means that the picture is being painted predigested.

I was much happier when I had less responsibility ... when my only responsibility was to my work and to myself.

And I think a painting has such a limited life anyway.

(Art is) a means to function thoroughly and passionately in a world that has a lot more to it than paint.

For me there is no difference between art and life.

And I think that even today, New York still has more of this unexpected quality around every corner than any place else. It's something quite extraordinary.

Understanding is a form of blindness. Good art, I think, can never be understood.

I don't think there's anything really wrong with influence because I think that one can use another man's art as material either literally or just implying that they're doing that, without it representing a lack of a point of view.

There was something about the self-confession and self-confusion of abstract expressionism - as though the man and the work were the same - that personally always put me off because at that time my focus was in the opposite direction.

But I found a lot of artists at the Cedar Bar were difficult for me to talk to.

People ask me, 'Don't you ever run out of ideas?' Well, on the first place, I don't use ideas. Every time I have an idea, it's too limiting and usually turns out to be a disappointment. But I haven't run out of curiosity.

I wouldn't use the same color in a picture in more than one place.

Well, I like way downtown near the Battery. I lived down there at this time and for, I guess, the following well, this is where I moved to uptown and I've been here for four years and this is 1965.

This was my first encounter with art as art (he saw 'Pinky' painted by Sir Thomas Lawrence and 'The Blue Boy painted by Thomas Gainborough) ... somebody actually MADE those paintings ... (it) was the first time I realized you could be an artist.

By the time you establish your priorities, there really isn't any fun or need to interest yourself in what you're doing. And this I find disastrous.

I always have searched for a point of view that a participant could change.

I don't really trust ideas, especially good ones. Rather I put my trust in the materials that confront me, because they put me in touch with the unknown.

Very quickly a painting is turned into a facsimile of itself when one becomes so familiar with with it that one recognizes it without looking at it.

Pollock also ... wanted one to be wrapped in the painting.

I think maybe chance works better in a situation like music because music exists over a period of time, and you don't maintain constantly the you can't refer back from one area to another area.

Steichen bought my first photographs that I ever sold. He recognized the style from the school of Black Mountain. After that, it was about twenty years before I sold another photograph.

I'm sure we don't read old paintings the way they were intended.

With me, it's much more a matter of accepting whatever happens, accepting all these elements from the outside and then trying to work with them in a sort of free collaboration.

I don't want a picture to look like something it isn't. I want it to look like something it is.

You wait until life is in the frame, then you have the permission to click. I like the adventure of waiting until the whole frame is full.

One has to believe in what one is doing, one has to commit oneself inwardly, in order to do painting. Once obsessed, one ultimately carries it to the point of believing that one might change human beings through painting. But if one lacks this passionate commitment, there is nothing left to do. Then it is best to leave it alone.

Painting relates to both art and life. Neither can be made. I try to act in that gap between the two.
- 1959, from a catalogue

It's so easy to be undisciplined. And to be disciplined is so against my character, my general nature anyway, that I have to strain a little bit to keep on the right track.

Basically painting is total idiocy.

Sometimes I have taken photographs and just felt so excited that I could barely hold the camera steady, and the photo was boring.

Every time I've moved, my work has changed radically.

I'm not so facile that I can accomplish or find out what I want to know or explore enough of the possibilities and a way of making a painting, say, in just one painting or two paintings.

This telegram is a work of art if I say it is.

Photography has always been a major part of my vision: my excuse for meddling with what the world looks like.

This is a portrait of Iris Clert if I say so.

So that ideas of sort of relaxed symmetry have been something for years that I have been concerned with because I think that symmetry is a neutral shape as opposed to a form of design.

I don't like masterpieces having one-night stands in collectors' homes between auctions.

I am sick of talking about What and Why I am doing. I have always believed that the WORK is the word. Action is seen less clearly through reason. There are no shortcuts to directness.

While my classmates were reading their textbooks, I drew in the margins.

Success is a worn down pencil.

There is no reason not to consider the world as one gigantic painting,

I think that in the last twenty years or so, there's been a new kind of honesty in painting where painters have been very proud of paint and have let it behave openly.