Painting and art cannot be taught. You can save time if someone tells you to put blue and yellow together to make green, but the essence of painting is a self-disciplined activity that you have to learn by yourself.
Romare BeardenYou should always respect what you are and your culture because if your art is going to mean anything, that is where it comes from.
Romare BeardenYou put down one color and it calls for an answer. You have to look at it like a melody.
Romare BeardenIf you're any kind of artist, you make a miraculous journey, and you come back and make some statements in shapes and colors of where you were.
Romare BeardenWhen I conjure these memories, they are of the present to me, because after all, the artist is a kind of enchanter in time.
Romare BeardenIt was not my aim to paint about the Negro in America in terms of propaganda. It is to depict the life of my people as I know it, passionately and dispassionately as Brueghel.
Romare BeardenPractically all great artists accept the influence of others. But... the artist with vision sees his material, chooses, changes, and by integrating what he has learned with his own experiences, finally molds something distinctly personnel.
Romare BeardenThe essence of art is to recapturel the fantasy and the imagination of a child again, but without the innocence of a child.
Romare BeardenThe artist has to be something like a whale swimming with his mouth wide open, absorbing everything until he has what he really needs.
Romare BeardenWhat I've attempted to do is establish a world through art in which the validity of my Negro experience could live and make its own logic.
Romare Bearden