Work, intoxication, brain racking, chewing, eating, gorging, rooting up, rapturous birthpangs, jabbing of the brush, preferably right through the canvas, trampling on paint tubes.
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On the driving force behind Expressionism.Max Pechstein
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When inspiration took me I threw away my brushes, dipped an old paint rag into the paint and smeared around on the canvas in blissful intoxication.
Emil Nolde
Most of the paint I use is a liquid, flowing kind of paint. The brushes I use are more a sticks rather than brushes – the brush doesn’t touch the surface on the canvas, it’s just above... [so] I am able to be more free and to have greater freedom and move about the canvas, with greater ease.
Jackson Pollock
A dripping wet canvas covered the entire floor... There was complete silence... Pollock looked at the painting. Then, unexpectedly, he picked up can and paint brush and started to move around the canvas. It was as if he suddenly realized the painting was not finished. His movements, slow at first, gradually became faster and more dance like as he flung black, white, and rust colored paint onto the canvas. He completely forgot that Lee and I were there; he did not seem to hear the click of the camera shutter... My photography session lasted as long as he kept painting, perhaps half an hour. In all that time, Pollock did not stop. How could one keep up this level of activity? Finally, he said "This is it."
Jackson Pollock
..there comes a point when something catches on the canvas, something grips on the canvas. I don’t know what it is, you can put your paint on the surface? Most of the time it looks like paint, and who the hell wants paint on a surface? But there does come a time – you take it off, put it on, goes over here, moves over a foot, as you go closer you start moving in inches not feet, half-inches – there comes a point when the paint doesn’t feel like paint. I don’t know why. Some mysterious thing happens. I think you have all experienced it.. ..What counts is that the paint should really disappear, otherwise it’s craft. That’s what I mean by something grips in a canvas. The moment that happens you are then sucked into the whole thing. Like some kind of rhythm.’
Phillip Guston
I see less and less....I need to avoid lateral light, which darkens my colors. Nevertheless, I always paint at the times of day most propitious for me, as long as my paint tubes and brushes are not mixed up....I will paint almost blind, as Beethoven composed completely deaf.
Claude Monet
Pechstein, Max
Peikoff, Leonard
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