Art Quotes by Australian Artist Brett Whiteley

Here’s a list of 10 art quotes by Australian artist Brett Whiteley (1939-1992). He was the artist that opened art up for me. All the art I had looked at before Brett Whiteley was very traditional and rather dull. After discovering the work of Whiteley I realised you could distort and transform things as much as you wanted.

He made art interesting for me and it was then that I started to take painting more seriously. And I’ve been hooked on the art drug ever since.

Brett Whiteley Quotes

• I love the stoniness and creaminess, that wonderful soiled magnolia feeling. Paris is so sensual, beautiful, flirtatious, mischievous, arrogant, orderly, so civilized. They call Paris a whore because she seduces you on every corner, and every street I turned, I could see another picture. Brett Whiteley
• Art should astonish, transmute, transfix. One must work at the tissue between truth and paranoia. Brett Whiteley
• A painting is a record of the extremely intensified moments of life – where more than one space, two senses of time, more than the law even seems at work, where the emotional forces seem to be propelling one to a dangerous limit, where reason and explanations become too enfeebled or too speeded-up to matter. Brett Whiteley
• Painting is an argument between what it looks like and what it means. Brett Whiteley
• I was intrigued and enormously drawn to extremism by people who had blown their lives or who had taken their lives outside the normal conventions of society. Brett Whiteley
• Drawing is the art of being able to leave an accurate record of the experience of what one isn’t, of what one doesn’t know. A great drawer is either confirming beautifully what is commonplace or probing authoritatively the unknown. Brett Whiteley
• I can’t stand mindless purity – I have soaked myself in skepticism and am by nature magnetized to bitterness. Brett Whiteley
• I am interested in beauty which can best be described as being on time for the appointment. Brett Whiteley
• How to make images of this city that are not cliche.. millions of pictures have been painted.. how to find a vision is the challenge. What one is after is a high-octane visual poetic journalism, brief, essential and above all, fresh. This can best be achieved by drawing, and not by the heavy metier of oil paint. Brett Whiteley
• The purpose of drawing is to make freshness permanent. Out of billions of seconds of futility, occasionally, sparks of the life force are immutably held forever. Brett Whiteley

Here’s a painting by Brett Whiteley..

See more Art Quotes by famous artists here or the most recent post of Quotes by Artists here. Also remember to subscribe to my Youtube channel here.