Bram van Velde on Art

"Painting is so stupid, so simple. I paint to get out of the through. I paint my misery."

"Creating a painting is a matter of ensuring that all its parts achieve unity. Though it's a precarious, fragile unity."

"I start off on the canvas and, little by little, it imposes its own solution. But that solution is not easy to find."

"Painting, an oeuvre, is not such a big deal, it is so unimportant. But that’s precisely what makes it interesting."

"It is important to see that my paintings are ultimately stimulating. They are not at all the kind of thing that inspires despair."

"The real horror is mass production. Painting when there is no compulsion to do so… …Pictures like that are all unpunished crimes."

"Artists don’t live in the everyday world. That’s why people think they’re an odd bunch."

"I am well aware that a painting must inevitably be a bizarre, incomprehensible thing."

"Most people's lives are governed by willpower. An artist is someone who has no will."

"The beauty other people create is not for the artists. Artists have to live alone."

"When I look back to a recent painting, I can hardly bear th suffering in it."

"Yes, I abandoned everything. Painting required it. It was all or nothing."

"What the eye can see won't get us very far. And what it can see is so limited, so restricted. But a gouache or an oil painting can be seen at a glance, can take in a whole world at a single glance."

"A painting is not a battle against other people, but against oneself."

"Through painting I try to get closer to nothingness, to the void."

"Painting doesn't interest me.. .What I paint is beyond painting."

"I am in a thousand pieces. Painting somehow makes me whole."

"Mondrian? His mind was too subtle. He worked in the light. I work in the darkness.. .Mondrian is the Buddha of painting. I saw him once. You wondered how a man could radiate such charisma."

"Each painting is linked to a fundamental drama."

"Each painting contains so much suffering."

"Paris with its multitude of art directions calls continuously to the deepest penetration and recognition of your inner essence. Only in this way it is possible to create work that refers the time span."

"I paint the impossibility of painting."

"Mondrian.. .The constructivists?.. .They had certainties. They wanted a stable basis to work on, but I’m afraid that that was enormous arrogance on their part. Nothing is stable and no certainties are possible."

"About Van Gogh.. a man who is on fire, a torch. His sincerity is absolute. His best painting is the grain field where he kills himself. There we find ourselves at the border of the art of painting. We cannot go further."

"When you are working, you are so far away and so absorbed, it's inevitable that you fall into a vacuum when you stop.. ..every time when I finish a painting, I always have to wait to get my strength back before I can begin another."