Arshile Gorky
From Wikiquote
Vostanik Manoog Adoyan, (better known as Arshile Gorky) (April 15, 1904 – July 21, 1948) was an American abstract expressionist painter of Armenian descent, living and working in New York, where he was later strongly involved with American Surrealism. He was a very close friend of Willem de Kooning who respected him as a teacher in painting.
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- I was with Cézanne for a long time, and now naturally I am with Picasso
- Gorky Memorial Exhibition, Schwabacher pp. 28, as quoted in Movements in art since 1945, Edward Lucie-Smith, Thames and Hudson 1975, p. 31
- I am an individual Gorky – and it is my individual feeling which counts for the most. Why? I do not know nor do I wish to know. I accept it as a fact, which does not need explanation.
- unpublished letter, as quoted in “Astract Expressionist Painting in America’’, W.C, Seitz, Cambridge Massachusetts, 1983, p. 133
- I like the heat the tenderness the edible the lusciousness the song of a single person the bathtub full of water to bathe myself beneath the water.. ..I like the wheatfields the plough the apricots those flirts of the sun. But bread above all. (1942):
- Gorky Memorial Exhibition, Schwabacher pp. 28, as quoted in Movements in art since 1945, Edward Lucie-Smith, Thames and Hudson 1975, p 31
- When something is finished, that means it’s dead, doesn’t it? I believe in everlastingness. I never finish a painting – I just stop working on it for a while. I like painting because it’s something I never come to the end of. Sometimes I paint a picture, then I paint it all out. Sometimes I’m working on fifteen or twenty pictures at the same time. I do that because I want to – because I like to change my mind so often. The thing to do is always to keep starting to paint, never finishing painting.(1947)
- Movements in art since 1945, Edward Lucie-Smith, Thames and Hudson 1975, p 32
- ..poor art for poor people (critic on social realism art)
- Abstract Expressionist Painting in America, W.C, Seitz, Cambridge Massachusetts 1983, p. 6
- You know how fussy and particular I am in painting. I am ever removing the paint and repainting the spot until I am completely exhausted.
- Gorky Memorial, Schwabacher, p. 12; as quoted in Abstract Expressionist Painting in America, W.C, Seitz, Cambridge Massachusetts 1983, p. 15
- (Stuart Davis).. .. is one of but few, who realized his canvas as a.. .. two-dimensional surface plane. (1931)
- Stuart Davis, Arshile Gorky, Creative Art 9, September 1931, p. 213
- Movement is the translation of life, and if art depicts life, movement should come into art, since we are only aware of living because it moves.
- unpublished letter, as quoted in Astract Expressionist Painting in America, W.C, Seitz, Cambridge Massachusetts, 1983, p. 64
- About a hundred and ninety-four feet away from our house (in Armenia, fh) on the road to the spring, my father had a little garden with a few apple trees which had retired from giving fruit. There was a ground constantly in shade where grew incalculable amounts of wild carrots, and porcupines had made their nests. There was a blue rock half buried in the black earth with a few patches of moss placed here and there like fallen clouds. But from where came all the shadows in constant battle like the lancers of Paolo Ucello’s painting? This garden was identified as the Garden of Wish Fulfilment and often I had seen my mother and other village women opening their bosoms and taking out their soft breasts in their hands to rub them on the rock. Above this all stood an enormous tree all bleached under the sun, the rain, the cold, and deprived of leaves. This was the Holy Tree. I myself don’t know why this tree was holy but I had witnessed many people, whoever did pass by, that would tear voluntarily a strip of their clothes and attach this to the tree. Thus through many years of the same ac, like a veritable parade of banners under the pressure of wind all these personal inscriptions of signatures, very softly to my innocent ear used to give echo to the sh-h—h-sh—h of silver leaves of the poplars.
- Gorky Memorial Exhibition, Schwabacher pp. 22,23, as quoted in Astract Expressionist Painting in America, W.C, Seitz, Cambridge Massachusetts, 1983, p. 124
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- The stuff of thought is the seed of artists. Dreams from the bristles of the artist's brush.
- I communicate my innermost perceptions through art.. ..my world view.
