Michael Craig-Martin Quotes

The viewer brings all additional information to the image.

I thought the objects we value least because they were ubiquitous were actually the most extraordinary.

As an artist you are free to use any image, any style, any idea from any culture and any period of history.

I think the best approach is not to be too much like the thing that they are referring to, see it as a guide.

Today, in British education, we don’t have that kind of freedom. Now there are many regulations, many rules, and bureaucracies in the education system. So, it doesn’t have the flexibility that it had in the ’60s, ’70s, ’80s.

If I did not love the things that I do, how could I spend my life doing this? You have to invest what you spend your life doing with pleasure.

I decided I should use the most obvious colours – the basic colours with simple names: red, purple, yellow, pink. I don’t distort the objects, I don’t change the objects, I draw them exactly as they are. I do the opposite with the colours.

I try to make images that have the immediate presence we take for granted in objects – a chair, a shoe, a book, a Judd – and compose them like sentences.

Art is more to do with observation than invention.

When I was teaching I often said to students that you are trying to be too creative, don’t be too creative, because there is so much already in what you are making, you don’t need to do very much. You just need to do a little bit, and that is a lot.

You can see in my paintings, I’ve taken away the context, I’ve taken away the shadows, I’ve taken away expression, I’ve taken away the personal, and yet so much remains!

‘Understanding’ art is like having a sense of humour – if you don’t have one, no amount of explanation is going to make you laugh.

You can’t force yourself to be something you are not.

I am trying to present objects in the simplest way possible, and I don’t want to supply too much context.

The complexity of the language of images is disguised by the ease and rapidity with which we read them. I’ve tried to make work that is as transparent and simple as possible. No matter how much I strip away the result is always more complex to me than I expect.

If you close the door to the things you feel comfortable with, you will never discover the truth about yourself.

I think from an artist’s point of view, everything in art, in fact everything in the world is available as material.

If you try to copy something exactly you won’t get it correct, because you don’t share the same tradition and context.

Whatever happens to the art world, art will go on regardless. As for obscurity, it looms just over the horizon beckoning us all. Why worry.