Bram van Velde on Philosophy

"You are in constant danger of being destroyed."

"I need to go towards the illogical. This world we live in destroys us. It is always governed by the same laws. You have to create images that don’t belong to it. That are totally different from those it presents us."

"Picasso.. ..the master.. ..being a master: 'I don't search, I find' ..the master, the mastery.. ..Producing, producing.. .He only knows how to work, can’t do anything else. What lost souls!.. .The great risk is producing for its own sake. You must never force things. You just have to wait."

"The real world with its common logic pushes us toward catastrophe. The artists seek in his work to free himself from this weight. Art is being transformed into politics, love into trade, education into an apparatus for stifling the mind. In the midst of such horrors, clearly only the dream within me has life. But how do other people live? -There is color, virginal expression - new, without a cage, without routine, without limit, a bath of sun and light. We must realize that nothing man does is of any value. The trouble is that people want to be paid. Only sick men can be artists. Their suffering pushes them into the accomplishment of deeds which reinvest the world with meaning. The sensitive man or the artist can only be a sick man in our civilized life, so full of lies. To think of art as a profession, how appealing! – Painting is man in the face of his downfall."