Bram van Velde on Life

"I feel myself tied to life. To the immensity and complexity of life. Each painting is an impulse towards life."

"Each of my paintings is a cycle. It’s like existence, life. They are always in motion.. .If they were fixed and static, they would be false."

"Painting is an aid to vision. It turns life, the complexity of life, into something visible. It reveals things that we don’t know how to see."

"Painting is an eye, a blinded eye that continues to see, and sees what blinds it.. ..this tiny little thing, which is nothing, which dominates life."

"Of course painting is ridiculous. But it’s the only way I've got to get closer to life."

"I can't say or explain anything. Pictures don’t come from your head but from life.. .I am always looking for life. All that escapes thought or will-power."

"An artist’s life is all very fine and moving. But only in retrospect. In books."

"Artists who are the defenders of true life become phonies. That’s the perfidious thing about this world. Society turns anyone with a bit of life inside them into a medical case."

"The artist is living a secret that he has to make manifest"

"Painting is being alive. Through my painting, I beat back this world that stops us living and where we are in constant danger of being destroyed.. .No, you have to know when to keep silent."

"The artist is the bearer of life."

"Life is so difficult to catch."

"Life is wrecked by living."

"I met Beckett at my brother’s place. That was a Big meeting , in capital letters. It was before war started, life was still normal. That time I was very lonely. We saw each other often. Before the war he had published already something, but his fame came in 1953. We never spoke about his work. He was a taciturn man. Sometimes a word escaped from his mouth. Sure, a word you would never forget. It would stick in your head... This friendship with Beckett is the most important experience in my life. He was fully alive for my way of working. What he could express in words, I did with my paintings."

"If these gouaches live at all, it is because they are true, they derive from life. They are born of the unknown – and not of habit or know-how, or intention, or of some recipe.. ..there comes a time when serious work is no longer an effort. When demanding work of that kind no longer tires you."

"When I am painting, driven by lively tensions, I want to express what’s going on in me. When that tension has ceased, when the life in me became visible, then something happened which had to happen. Over and over again you experience a work which is created in this way. What happened? It is hard to say, because it was not my mind that led but the inner desire that revealed its inner life."

"My work is independent of my will. My best works are created when driven by an inner strength. This has nothing to do with my will. It is that immediate spontaneity of my intense way of living that makes the difference between my work and a lot of other artists who make art works with their mind."

"I'm now in a big working period, which takes me up so much that hardly anything of me remains. I have never been strong in theories and this becomes worse and worse. My work should give me satisfaction, and that is about life and death.. .Several paintings full of life and beauty arose again and give me the courage and joy to proceed on the road. There are also several paintings in which I am involved for less than half, discharges in a short time, which have existence for a while, but will not reach shaping."

"When you cross any border there is always an uneasy moment when you feel yourself automatically an enemy. Artists don’t belong to any group or country.. .When you are living the truth, the world no longer exists, events become unimportant. But the way of truth is not easy.. ..if you are on the side of truth, you have no power. That’s why you are always defeated. The power, all the power, is on the side of the world.. .I have been completely absorbed in my adventure. No country, no family, no ties. I didn’t exist anymore. I just had to press on."