Douglas Portway Quotes

My paintings should become objects into which one could float, as in water, so that one's mind is hung... suspended, and the emanation of the painting would penetrate into people's consciousness.

Any art which can be subjected to an analytical process is, by this very fact, removed from the possibility of being art.

I want my paintings to have a light of their own, they must glow from inside.

There must be something in oneself which is essential. Therefore I refrain from referring to a landscape or certain objects when speaking of a picture. The hand is cleverer than the mind.

I believe that one of the most important properties of a work of art is an attempt to reconcile opposites, and in their fusion to achieve a 'wholeness' or 'oneness,' the experiencing of which should be revelatory - both for the artist and the spectator - something akin to the experience of enlightenment in terms of religion.

Ideally there is a type of continuum which flows from life through the artist's sensibility and his materials... the concreteness of the object and its own life , through the spectator, with his expectations, interpretations, back into life.

When a spectator approaches a painting with his own particular set of filters or theories, be they historical, political, intellectual or whatever - he either finds what he is looking for or dismisses the work as irrelevant. He has deprived himself of the possibility of any fresh experience or revelation by looking only for confirmation of that which he already 'knows.

Art is precisely that condition which pertains when, after all analysis and reduction to parts has taken place, there remains a 'quality' which is more than the sum of those parts, which could not exist in any other form, and which cannot be caught, or held, or contained.