If only someone else could paint what I see, it would be marvellous, because then I wouldnt have to paint at all.
ALBERTO GIACOMETTII see something, find it marvelous, want to try and do it. Whether it fails or whether it comes off in the end becomes secondary. So long as I’ve learned something about why.
More Alberto Giacometti Quotes
-
-
When I see a head from a great distance, it ceases to be a sphere and becomes an extreme confusion falling down into the abyss.
ALBERTO GIACOMETTI -
The head is what matters. The rest of the body plays the part of antennae making life possible for people and life itself is inside the skull.
ALBERTO GIACOMETTI -
Art is the residue of vision.
ALBERTO GIACOMETTI -
In a fire, between a Rembrandt and a cat, I would save the cat.
ALBERTO GIACOMETTI -
The human face is as strange to me as a countenance, which, the more one looks at it, the more it closes itself off and escapes by the steps of unknown stairways.
ALBERTO GIACOMETTI -
What I am looking for is not happiness. I work solely because it is impossible for me to do anything else.
ALBERTO GIACOMETTI -
It was always disappointing to see that what I could really master in terms of form boiled down to so little.
ALBERTO GIACOMETTI -
The object of art is not to reproduce reality, but to create a reality of the same intensity.
ALBERTO GIACOMETTI -
I don’t know if I work in order to do something, or in order to know why I can’t do what I want to do.
ALBERTO GIACOMETTI -
When one lives with problems of importance, the prostitute is ideal. You pay, and whether or not you fail is of no importance. She doesn’t care.
ALBERTO GIACOMETTI -
I’ve tried doing so, for it was never my intention to paint only with gray. But in the course of my work I have eliminated one color after another, and what has remained is gray, gray, gray!
ALBERTO GIACOMETTI -
Artistically I am still a child with a whole life ahead of me to discover and create. I want something, but I won’t know what it is until I succeed in doing it.
ALBERTO GIACOMETTI -
All the art of the past rises up before me, the art of all ages and all civilizations, everything becomes simultaneous, as if space had replaced time. Memories of works of art blend with affective memories, with my work, with my whole life.
ALBERTO GIACOMETTI -
That’s the terrible thing: the more one works on a picture, the more impossible it becomes to finish it.
ALBERTO GIACOMETTI -
If I see everything in gray, and in gray all the colors which I experience and which I would like to reproduce, then why should I use any other color?
ALBERTO GIACOMETTI -
All I can do will only ever be a faint image of what I see and my success will always be less than my failure or perhaps equal to the failure.
ALBERTO GIACOMETTI -
When you look at art made by other people, you see what you need to see in it.
ALBERTO GIACOMETTI -
The more I work, the more I see things differently, that is, everything gains in grandeur every day, becomes more and more unknown, more and more beautiful. The closer I come, the grander it is, the more remote it is.
ALBERTO GIACOMETTI -
Whores are the most honest girls. They present the bill right away.
ALBERTO GIACOMETTI -
Failure is my best friend. If I succeeded, it would be like dying. Maybe worse.
ALBERTO GIACOMETTI -
I paint and sculpt to get a grip on reality… to protect myself.
ALBERTO GIACOMETTI -
All the sculptures of today, like those of the past, will end one day in pieces… So it is important to fashion ones work carefully in its smallest recess and charge every particle of matter with life.
ALBERTO GIACOMETTI -
I don’t know who I am or who I was. I know it less than ever. I do and I don’t identify myself with myself. Everything is totally contradictory, but maybe I have remained exactly as I was as a small boy of twelve.
ALBERTO GIACOMETTI -
In every work of art the subject is primordial, whether the artist knows it or not. The measure of the formal qualities is only a sign of the measure of the artist’s obsession with his subject; the form is always in proportion to the obsession.
ALBERTO GIACOMETTI -
The older I grow, the more I find myself alone.
ALBERTO GIACOMETTI -
I’ve been fifty thousand times to the Louvre. I have copied everything in drawing, trying to understand.
ALBERTO GIACOMETTI