Walter Darby Bannard Quotes & Sayings

#1. Trying to be original is futile. If you have no place to go, stay home and cook.

Walter Darby Bannard

#2. Very few people ever understand art. If you are lucky, they will buy it for the wrong reasons.

Walter Darby Bannard

#3. Asking art to express ideas is like asking a Sumo wrestler to play charades.

Walter Darby Bannard

#4. Writing about art is only useful when it leads to the experience of art.

Walter Darby Bannard

#5. The more freedom artists have to do what they want to do, the more they do what other artists are doing.

Walter Darby Bannard

#6. We must turn away from work that replaces experience and pleasure with explanation.

Walter Darby Bannard

#7. Craft' gets a bad rap. Mediocre art is not caused by craft; it is caused by artists. Good art employs whatever craft works best.

Walter Darby Bannard

#8. What is sublime? / the artist said. / I haven't time / to be well read. / To be sub lime / I'll place, instead, / green citrus fruit / upon my head.

Walter Darby Bannard

#9. There are too many artists, too many dealers and too much art.

Walter Darby Bannard

#10. Purplish brown? Let's agree it / is a color so bad we all flee it / it has no good use / so let's name it Puce / from the sound we make when we see it.

Walter Darby Bannard

#11. Dogmatism spreads its roots in the fertile soil of uncertainty.

Walter Darby Bannard

#12. A critic without a good eye is a eunuch in a harem.

Walter Darby Bannard

#13. Science is a matter of adjusting language to explain material reality. Art is a matter of adjusting material reality to create a sense of life.

Walter Darby Bannard

#14. Don't explain, enjoy.

Walter Darby Bannard

#15. When you 'break all the barriers' you get a pile of rubble.

Walter Darby Bannard

#16. Stale artifacts of the past' are always 'active components of the present moment' when they are experienced in the present moment.

Walter Darby Bannard

#17. A clear idea about the nature of quality in art will always result in inferior art tailored to it.

Walter Darby Bannard

#18. Making art is like swimming underwater in a blindfold.

Walter Darby Bannard

#19. When realistic images or patterns are seen in an abstract painting, they are often parallels brought about by processes in painting which echo processes in nature.

Walter Darby Bannard

#20. When you write something new about science, other scientists may not like it but they pay attention because it is subject to proof. When you write something new about art, it is subject only to the reader's discomfort, and will probably be rejected.

Walter Darby Bannard

#21. Live to paint, don't paint to live.

Walter Darby Bannard

#22. Originality is way overrated. To make, you need to take. All great artists do.

Walter Darby Bannard

#23. There is no regional art. The only region left is the art magazine.

Walter Darby Bannard

#24. Postmodernism does not facilitate better art. It rationalizes inferior art by wrapping it in words - a suit of armor with nobody inside.

Walter Darby Bannard

#25. Without the eye, the head is blind. Without the head, the eye is adrift.

Walter Darby Bannard

#26. Talent is like a seed which needs fertile soil. There is no less talent now, there is less fertile soil to nourish it.

Walter Darby Bannard

#27. Complete freedom debilitates art but reveals much about character.

Walter Darby Bannard

#28. You don't have to be a cave man to appreciate Lascaux.

Walter Darby Bannard

#29. Art flows more easily when you are not thinking about what 'should' be in it or how it 'should' be done. The Impressionists taught us to look and see, not assume.

Walter Darby Bannard

#30. Power is like money. Some know how to get it; few know how to use it.

Walter Darby Bannard

#31. When anything goes, everything goes.

Walter Darby Bannard

#32. Part of history is facts. The other part is what we find easier to believe.

Walter Darby Bannard

#33. Convention and restriction release inhibition and provoke the imagination.

Walter Darby Bannard

#34. Nothing is as hopeless as trying to justify art in words.

Walter Darby Bannard

#35. No high-minded painter of the last fifty years has been able to come to terms with his art without coming to terms with the problem of cubism.

Walter Darby Bannard

#36. To an art historian a Giotto is a 14th Century painting. To an artist it was painted yesterday. We free ourselves from the past when we see it freshly.

Walter Darby Bannard

#37. Most 'profound truths' are just timely ideas.

Walter Darby Bannard

#38. Postmodernism does not help us understand good art. It encourages art that can be easily understood and throws in something catchy to cover the loss of mystery.

Walter Darby Bannard

#39. Don't apologize, justify or rationalize bad art or bad writing. If you do, you are part of it.

Walter Darby Bannard

#40. The struggle to be original hates conformity, but the struggle to be better disregards it, or takes advantage of it to build workable conventions.

Walter Darby Bannard

#41. Most people find facts irritating. Facts interfere with their systems of denial.

Walter Darby Bannard

#42. When inspiration dies, imitation thrives.

Walter Darby Bannard

#43. If art depended on content, then one painting of an apple would be as good as the next one.

Walter Darby Bannard

#44. Postmodernism lives in the academy, where words abandon reality to serve ambition, and reputations rise on hot air.

Walter Darby Bannard

#45. Postmodernism is silly and joyless at the same time.

Walter Darby Bannard

#46. In art there is no absolute good or bad, but it is absolute that there is good and bad.

Walter Darby Bannard

#47. Always let intuitive perception precede analysis.

Walter Darby Bannard

#48. One needs to be right before getting righteous.

Walter Darby Bannard

#49. Start a painting with fresh ideas, and then let the painting replace your ideas with its ideas.

Walter Darby Bannard

#50. When you make the obvious mysterious, then the mysterious becomes unavailable.

Walter Darby Bannard

#51. When art writing seems incomprehensible, chances are it is.

Walter Darby Bannard

#52. When good ideas get put to bad use, it is the fault of the user, not the idea.

Walter Darby Bannard

#53. Good art has everything you need to know about it in the work, not on a wall label. Art is here to take us beyond language.

Walter Darby Bannard

#54. Conceptual art' is an oxymoron. Concepts are articulations of fact or supposition, not attributes of quality.

Walter Darby Bannard

#55. Good new art may not look like art. Inspiration doesn't follow style, it creates it.

Walter Darby Bannard

#56. Experience is real. Painting, which comes out of experience, is real. The world is an illusion.

Walter Darby Bannard

#57. Art is like a butterfly fluttering in a meadow. Analysis of art is like a butterfly on a pin. Each has its value, but we must always be aware of the difference, and what is gained or lost.

Walter Darby Bannard

#58. Assumptions are usually presumptuous but often correct.

Walter Darby Bannard

#59. When imitation goes over big, it isn't imitation, it is a trend.

Walter Darby Bannard

#60. Big minds have big ideas. Small minds use big ideas to justify bad ideas.

Walter Darby Bannard

#61. Art is there for nourishment, not explication.

Walter Darby Bannard

#62. Art is not 'about.' Art is.

Walter Darby Bannard

#63. Many years ago, Clement Greenberg said, 'All profoundly original work looks ugly at first.' This should be updated now to 'All profoundly ugly work looks original at first.

Walter Darby Bannard

#64. In ART as in Life the Best Way to REMEDY mistakes is to take advantage of them.

Walter Darby Bannard

#65. Truth is not always hard to find; it is often staring you in the face. The problem with truth is that it is hard to believe. It is even harder to get other people to believe.

Walter Darby Bannard

#66. There's a big difference between grabbing attention and rewarding attention.

Walter Darby Bannard

#67. The first duty of intelligence is to recognize the obvious.

Walter Darby Bannard

#68. Good art looks new because the artist has recombined something old to make something better.

Walter Darby Bannard

#69. Anything is OK in art if the art turns out OK.

Walter Darby Bannard

#70. Most art is just surface noise.

Walter Darby Bannard

#71. It matters little if something is 'craft' or 'art.' The question is only this: does it give me pleasure?

Walter Darby Bannard

#72. If we see an object as a bowl, it may inhibit seeing it as craft, just as seeing it as craft might inhibit seeing it as art. See first; name later.

Walter Darby Bannard

#73. Art may be for the privileged few but they have earned the privilege and deny it to no one.

Walter Darby Bannard

#74. The power of art is not in communication but effect; what it does, not what it relates.

Walter Darby Bannard

#75. Art is too popular. If plumbing was as popular as art is we would have amateur plumbers running around brandishing wrenches and Roto-Rooters, climbing in and out of sewers and writing gibberish about pipe systems. And none of our our toilets would work.

Walter Darby Bannard

#76. Art is making something better without knowing what better is until you make it.

Walter Darby Bannard

#77. We learn to lie by believing words rather than experience.

Walter Darby Bannard

#78. The art consensus is not criteria, it is convenience.

Walter Darby Bannard

#79. When making a painting, only one thing counts: what you do next.

Walter Darby Bannard

#80. Of course I will look at anything, but I have not got the time or the patience to keep on looking at art that I know could be better. I don't want art that needs fixing, I want art that sends me back to the studio to fix my own.

Walter Darby Bannard

#81. Great art does not break with the past. It breaks with the present by emulating the best of the past.

Walter Darby Bannard

#82. An ivory tower is a fine place as long as the door is open.

Walter Darby Bannard

#83. When you have made a good painting, don't do another like it, but remember the process, what you did, what you were thinking and feeling.

Walter Darby Bannard

#84. When you are painting a landscape, assume the painting is real and the landscape is an illusion.

Walter Darby Bannard

#85. If you learn something too well, it will get in the way of your perception of reality.

Walter Darby Bannard

#86. When anyone can produce dreck or publish gibberish, and not only get away with it but be celebrated for it, the discipline is no longer a discipline, and it will get no respect.

Walter Darby Bannard