Morris Graves Quotes

#1. I love and in a way need, a private secret place. It's a kind of deep obsession, but I also love to need and be with friends and the two things often need to be together ... it's a painful conflict that will never be smoothly resolved.

Morris Graves

#2. An artist is a prophet and seer, not a paint craftsman or design maker, or reporter or entertainer ... the artist has the superiorly searching perception with which that world outside of man's contamination can be penetrated and the truth drawn out from it.

Morris Graves

#3. Such compositions, line and color ideas, such wonders come into my mind and have stuck! - They will this time be dismissed only by being painted out ...

Morris Graves

#4. I am able to make a contribution ... Let me repeat my convictions, I can make a contribution to American painting.

Morris Graves

#5. I paint to rest from the phenomena of the external world-to pronounce and to make notations of its essences with which to verify the inner eye.

Morris Graves

#6. It takes waking prayer and working prayer and going to bed in prayer each day with increasing dedication. I must be the best person that I am able to be when I am painting. Tonight the wind is howling and the barrels are full of sky water.

Morris Graves

#7. I paint to evoke a changing language of symbols, a language with which to remark upon the qualities of our mysterious capacities which direct us toward ultimate reality.

Morris Graves

#8. The painting cannot be laid aside even for a day; for it takes constant work to keep 'flowing,' but above that it takes concentration, which in our language is consecration.

Morris Graves

#9. It is to aid in making the arts operative rather than only positively or negatively pleasurable ... it is to paint a record, in so far as I am increasingly capable, of man's deepst capacities ... I seek to paint of how form manifests its subtlest quality named 'idea.

Morris Graves

#10. It may not always be obvious at first, but I think that everyone can make a valuable contribution if only they put their minds to it.

Morris Graves