Thiebaud Quotes

#1. I haven't the slightest idea what art is, but to be a painter is something of which you have to prove.

Wayne Thiebaud

#2. The figures ... are not supposed to reveal anything ... It's like seeing a stranger in some place like an air terminal for the first time. You look at him, you notice his shoes, his suit, the pin in his lapel, but you don't have any particular feeling about him.

Wayne Thiebaud

#3. Morandi suggests we are all single in this world, hoping for independent repose. But our best opportunity for a community of excellence depends upon a collection of enlightened individuals.

Wayne Thiebaud

#4. The stars of midnight shall be dear
To her; and she shall lean her ear
In many a secret place
Where rivulets dance their wayward round,
And beauty born of murmuring sound
Shall pass into her face.

William Wordsworth

#5. When you think of painting as painting it is rather absurd. The real world is before us - glorious sunlight and activity and fresh air, and high speed motor cars and television, all the animation - a world apart from a little square of canvas that you smear paint on.

Wayne Thiebaud

#6. An artist needs the best studio instruction, the most rigorous demands, and the toughest criticism in order to tune up his sensibilities.

Wayne Thiebaud

#7. Every paint-stroke takes you farther and farther away from your initial concept. And you have to be thankful for that.

Wayne Thiebaud

#8. I don't make a lot of distinctions between things like landscape or figure painting, because to me the problems are inherently the same - lighting, color, structure, and so on - certainly traditional and ordinary problems.

Wayne Thiebaud

#9. Painting is more important than art.

Wayne Thiebaud

#10. As far as I'm concerned, there is only one study and that is the way in which things relate to one another.

Wayne Thiebaud

#11. Traveling the paths of greatness, even in someone else's footprints, is a vital means to acquiring skill.

Twyla Tharp

#12. Morandi gave an intimate view of his deepest thoughts. We watched him inquiring after the devilish questions of essences and substances.

Wayne Thiebaud

#13. If we don't have a sense of humor, we lack a sense of perspective

Wayne Thiebaud

#14. Common objects become strangely uncommon when removed from their context and ordinary ways of being seen.

Wayne Thiebaud

#15. it's harder for us to find what we are looking for and must do without, since we have come to expect more from friendship than most other people do. In this respect as well, it's not so easy to make do with "substitutes.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

#16. Discipline is not a restriction but an aid to freedom.

Wayne Thiebaud

#17. It's abominable, and it's a disgrace to a great democracy to see what's happened in our country. The main reason for that has been the enormous infusion of high quantities of money to campaigns - governors, Congress, president and the U.S. Senate.

Jimmy Carter

#18. An artist has to train his responses more than other people do. He has to be as disciplined as a mathematician. Discipline is not a restriction but an aid to freedom. It prepares an artist to choose his own limitations ...

Wayne Thiebaud

#19. I think of myself as a beginner. Sometimes that's the whole joy. If you could just do it, there'd be no point in doing it.

Wayne Thiebaud

#20. A painter is always overjoyed when anybody pays any attention to him at all, puts him in any category, calls him anything - as long as they call him something.

Wayne Thiebaud

#21. People who believe in excellence are full of patience, they are passionate of what they do and they don't cut corners. They invest their time in pursuit of being the best in everything they do.

Euginia Herlihy

#22. I'm not just interested in the pictorial aspects of the landscape - see a pretty place and try to paint it - but in some way to manage it, manipulate it, or see what I can turn it into.

Wayne Thiebaud

#23. I'm a believer in the notion that artists who do good work believe in the ideas of extremes.

Wayne Thiebaud

#24. Art is not delivered like the morning paper; it has to be stolen from Mount Olympus.

Wayne Thiebaud

#25. The whole of that part of Southern Africa which is controlled by racial minorities is experiencing either consistent and regular guerilla activity or is faced with advanced preparation for its commencement.

Joe Slovo

#26. I don't really care for, like, fat jokes about women, specifically.

Sarah Silverman

#27. Art means something very rare, an extraordinary achievement.

Wayne Thiebaud

#28. One of the most stubborn barriers to patient empowerment is the cultural assumption that since the way professionals learned was hard, you must need to be really smart, and you need to be taught in a carefully thought out, methodical sequence.

Dave DeBronkart

#29. We all need critical confrontation of the fullest and most extreme kind that we can get. You can unnecessarily limit yourself by choosing your criticism ...

Wayne Thiebaud

#30. The Gold Rush and the Pony Express made Sacramento a substantial place in terms of enterprise.

Wayne Thiebaud

#31. If you stare at an object, as you do when you paint, there is no point at which you stop learning things from it.

Wayne Thiebaud

#32. The art music of the West has developed through out its history by means of individual geniuses, and out of the soil supporting them; non-Western musicians were born, and grew like the grasses of the field.

Toru Takemitsu

#33. My sin as a painter is that I just want to paint anything I want to paint - and repaint.

Wayne Thiebaud

#34. The world will teach our children if we do not, and children are capable of learning all the world will teach them at a very young age.

Rosemary M. Wixom

#35. Everyone who's serious about what they're doing must be in constant motion forward.

Ed O'Brien

#36. Last night your thin walls invited me to the party next door / reminded me I am a quiet person in a quiet life.

Drew Myron

#37. Real movie producers aren't this nice.

Joel Siegel

#38. Art is one of the dirtiest words in our language; it's mucked up with all kinds of meanings. There's the art of plumbing; there's the art of almost anything that you can say.

Wayne Thiebaud

#39. If I don't have anything better to do that day, I'll copy paintings, generally by people who have some relationship to the work of the moment.

Wayne Thiebaud