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I’m not an expert, but I want to be.

Ben Nicholson

Any ideal system is its own worst enemy, and as soon as you start to implement these visions of grandeur, they just fall apart and turn into a complete tyranny.
BEN NICHOLSON

Enemy Fall Tyrants Worst
Satire is fascinating stuff. It’s deadly serious, and when politics begin to break down, there is a drift towards satire, because it’s the only thing that makes any sense.
BEN NICHOLSON

Breaking Down Serious Stuff
The beast for me is greed. Whether you read Dante, Swift, or any of these guys, it always boils down to the same thing: the corruption of the soul.
BEN NICHOLSON

Greed Guy Soul
Student journeys which were important to me were Sicily, Greece, and Egypt, where I really saw these buildings, and that is where you’re able to grasp what things mean.
BEN NICHOLSON

Country Journey Mean
I see man more as an instrument or an agent more than anything else.
BEN NICHOLSON

Agents Instruments Men
I’m interested in locating the holy grail of the minimum means to express the most complex ideas.
BEN NICHOLSON

Grail Holy Ideas Mean
The kind of painting which I find exciting is not necessarily representational or non-representational, but it is musical and architectural… Whether this visual relationship is slightly more or slightly less abstract is, for me, beside the point.
BEN NICHOLSON

Kind Musical Painting
I’m not an expert, but I want to be.
BEN NICHOLSON

Desire Experts Want
I’m just interested in meditating on certain ideas, and I like to draw: that’s my way of thinking.
BEN NICHOLSON

Drawing Ideas Thinking
I started producing work with an ecstatic addiction.
BEN NICHOLSON

Addiction Ecstatic Work
The corruption of the American soul is consumerism.
BEN NICHOLSON

Consumerism Corruption Soul
Painting’ and ‘religious experience’ are the same thing. It is a question of the perpetual motion of a right idea.
BEN NICHOLSON

Ideas Painting Religious
What I feel bad about is not having published very much in the last few years.
BEN NICHOLSON

Feels Lasts Years
You can just drift unhappily towards this vision of heaven on earth, and ultimately that is what architecture is a vision of: Heaven on earth, at it’s best.
BEN NICHOLSON

Earth Heaven Vision
Realism’ has been abandoned in the search for reality: the ‘principal objective’ of abstract art is precisely this reality.
BEN NICHOLSON

Abandoned Art Reality
I haven’t done any building designs since the Loaf House.
BEN NICHOLSON

Design Done House

I’m not an expert, but I want to be.

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I’m not an expert, but I want to be.

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