Joan Miro Quotes

I feel the need of attaining the maximum of intensity with the minimum of means. It is this which has led me to give my painting a character of even greater bareness.

The painting rises from the brushstrokes as a poem rises from the words. The meaning comes later.

I make no distinction between poetry and painting.

When I stand before a canvas, I never know what I'll do, and I am the first one surprised at what comes out.

The spectacle of the sky overwhelms me. Im overwhelmed when I see, in an immense sky, the crescent of the moon, or the sun. There, in my pictures, tiny forms in huge empty spaces. Empty spaces, empty horizons, empty plains - everything which is bare has always greatly impressed me.

I try to apply colors like words that shape poems, like notes that shape music.

You can look at a picture for a week and never think of it again. You can also look at the picture for a second and think of it all your life.

I want to assassinate painting.

For me, a painting must give off sparks. It must dazzle like the beauty of a woman or a poem.

Never, never do I set to work on a canvas in the state it comes in from the shop. I provoke accidents - a form, a splotch of color. Any accident is good enough. I let the matiere decide. Then I prepare a ground by, for example, wiping my brushes on the canvas. Letting fall some drops of turpentine on it would do just as well. If I want to make a drawing I crumple the sheet of paper or I wet it; the flowing water traces a line and this line may suggest what is to come next.

The works must be conceived with fire in the soul but executed with clinical coolness.

My characters have undergone the same process of simplification as the colors. Now that they have been simplified, they appear more human and alive than if they had been represented in all their details.

For me an object is something living. This cigarette or this box of matches contains a secret life much more intense than that of certain human beings.

More important than a work of art itself is what it will sow. Art can die, a painting can disappear. What counts is the seed.

A simple line painted with the brush can lead to freedom and happiness.

To gain freedom is to gain simplicity.

Little by little, I've reached the stage of using only a small number of forms and colors. It's not the first time that painting has been done with a very narrow range of colors. The frescoes of the tenth century are painted like this. For me, they are magnificent things.

What I am looking for... is an immobile movement, something which would be the equivalent of what is called the eloquence of silence, or what St. John of the Cross, I think it was, described with the term 'mute music'.

Painting or poetry is made as one makes love - a total embrace, prudence thrown to the winds, nothing held back.

The more I work, the more I want to work.

What I will no longer accept is the mediocre life of a modest little gentleman.

Throughout the time in which I am working on a canvas I can feel how I am beginning to love it, with that love which is born of slow comprehension.

I believe that to do anything in this world one needs a love for risk and adventure, and above all, to be able to do without what middle-class families call "future."

The simplest things give me ideas.

Painting must be fertile. It must give birth to a world.. ..it must fertilize the imagination.

I begin painting and as I paint the picture begins to assert itself, or suggest itself, under my brush. The form becomes a sign for a woman or a bird as I work... The first stage is free, unconscious... the second stage is carefully calculated.

If you have any notion of where you are going, you will never get anywhere.