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"There is always a paradox inherent in vision, an impossible desire to see yourself seeing. A lot of my work probes this tension; to want to see, but not being able to." 

Spencer Finch

I was fortunate to see the remarkable exhibition Spencer Finch: What Time Is It on the Sun? at Mass MoCA in 2006. I am including a link to the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art site if you would like to learn more about this artist, who combines conceptualism with aesthetic and tactile (visual) modalities. I took a lot of photos of the piece represented above (SUNLIGHT IN AN EMPTY ROOM (PASSING CLOUD FOR EMILY DICKINSON, AMHERST, MA, AUGUST 28 2004) 2004), and included just three here. 

http://www.massmoca.org/event_details.php?id=28

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“[The doctor and lawyer] do not have to spin their work out of themselves, discover its laws, and then present themselves turned inside out to the public gaze.”

Anne Truitt

Daybook, New York: Penguin Books, 1984.

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“Every so often, a painter has to destroy painting.  Cézanne did it.  Picasso did it with cubism.  Then Pollock did it.  He busted our idea of a picture all to hell.  Then there could be new paintings again.”

Willem de Kooning

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Agnes Martin:  You can ask me for my definition of art if you want.

Joan Simon:     OK, I will.  What is it, please?

Agnes Martin: Art is the concrete representation of our most subtle feelings. That’s the end.

“Perfection Is In The Mind: An Interview with Agnes Martin” (1995), Art in America, May 1996.

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“It was a kind of test — like when you say something out loud to see if you believe it...[It] was on the one hand a totally silly idea and yet, on the other hand, I believed it.” 

[on ‘Window or Wall Sign’, 1967, “The true artist helps the world by revealing mystic truths.” ]

Bruce Nauman

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“Painting is a state of being ... self-discovery.  Every good artist paints what he is.”

Jackson Pollock

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“I didn’t want my work to be an exposure of my feelings. Abstract expressionism was so lively - personal identity and painting were more or less the same. . . But I found I couldn’t do anything that would be identical with my feelings. So I worked in such a way that I could say that it’s not me.”

“I’m Not a Pop artist!”

Jasper Johns

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“Photography is a combination of high adventure and low comedy, of meticulous planning and absolute change, of infinite patience and quick reflexes.”

"Photography is a combination of design and emotion.”

Eve Arnold, photographer

The New York Times Magazine, Part 2, Fashions of the Times, Fall 2002, 8.18.02

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Soon enough, the fears and desires and dreams are as mad as a tropical jungle and as salacious as Forty-second Street. I challenge psychotherapy’s cool green consulting rooms, the soothing images and framed diplomas, because they are calming and cooling the valuable madness in our society so that psychology has become part of Henry Miller’s Air-Conditioned Nightmare, his phrase for the U.S.A.

James Hillman

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Suppose we entertain the idea that psychology makes people mediocre; and suppose we entertain the idea that the world is in extremis, suffering an acute, perhaps fatal, disorder at the edge of extinction... 

Therapy as sedation: ... You see, Michael, for me the job of psychotherapy is to open up and deal with - no, not deal with, encourage, maybe even inflame - the rich and crazy mind, that wonderful aviary (the image is from Plato) of wild flying thoughts, the sex-charged fantasies, the incredible longings, bloody wounds, and the museums of archaic shards that constitute the psyche. ... 

James Hillman

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Perhaps the way to begin the revolution is to stand up for your depression. 

James Hillman 

James Hillman and Michael Ventura, We’ve Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy and the Worls’s Getting Worse, San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1993.

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  “When an artist uses a conceptual form of art, it means that all of the planning and decisions are made beforehand and the execution is a perfunctory affair.  The idea becomes the machine that makes the art.”

(Paragraphs on Conceptual art, Artforum, Summer 1967)

Sol LeWitt

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“... life itself ... is absolute art.”

Yves Klein

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Man is only truly alive when he realizes he is a creative, artistic being .... even the act of peeling a potato can be considered a work of art if it is a conscious act.”

Joseph Beuys

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“As I see it, it’s an imposition to impose my personal life on the art which attempts to present something to people that is not just  about me. It is about materials, and about the world they live in, perhaps, but it is not about themselves, their own personal everyday lives, which is what I try to take out of my art.”

Lawrence Weiner

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“I cannot be so many things ... Woman, beautiful, artist, wife, housekeeper, cook, saleslady, all these things.  I cannot even be myself.”

Eva Hesse

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1. Conceptual artists are mystics rather than rationalists.  They leap to conclusions that logic cannot reach....

Sol LeWitt

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“Basically, collectors want nudes.  So I have supplied for them nude cars, nude telephones, nude electric plugs, nude switches, nude fans.”

“The erotic or the sexual is the root of art.”

Claes Oldenburg

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In accordance with the Divine Teachings, the acquisition of sciences and the perfection of arts are considered as acts of worship.

Abdu’l-Baha

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“... the future of the world must be this realization of its oneness, which is the basic teaching as I understand it in the Bahá’í Faith, and from that oneness will naturally develop a new spirit in art, because that’s what it is. It’s a spirit and it’s not new words and not new ideas only. It’s a different spirit. And that spirit of oneness will be reflected through painting.”

Mark Tobey