Best 17 quotes of Marlene Dumas on MyQuotes

At the moment my art is situated between the pornographic tendency to reveal everything and the erotic inclination to hide what it's all about.

Drawings are only a few lines on paper. Therefore it's easy to carry around in plastic bags. Drawings are cheaper than paintings. They don't pretend they'll last forever.

I am against: general ideas / the nude / the appropriation of images / the mystification of the untitled / the glorification of artistic doubt / the fuzzy edges of sensitivity / old sins / and useless guilt.

I do think that I'm not good at making pretty things. It doesn't come so naturally for me.

I'm always so sick of myself after a show.

I moved to Holland because I wanted to see American art.

I never learned to ride a bicycle, and it is too late now. I never learned to drive. I never learned to swim.

My best works are erotic displays of mental confusions.. with intrusions of irrelevant information.

No painting can exist without the tension of what it figures and what it concretely consists of. The pleasure of what it could mean and the pain of what it's not.

Painting doesn't freeze time. It circulates and recycles time like a wheel that turns. Those who were first might well be last. Painting is a very slow art. It doesn't travel with the speed of light. That's why dead painters shine so bright.

The best works do not necessarily get to auction. I like to draw, so maybe I give you a little drawing. And then eventually it ends up at auction. And then critics say, 'Oh, that's a bad drawing!' Well, I didn't say it was so wonderful.

What a funny thing painting is. The abstract painters always insist on their connection with the visible reality, while the so called figurative artists insist that what they really care about, is the abstract qualities of life.

When Black and White are colors and not races, people will still fall in love and discriminate between partners and feel sad and bad and need art that breaks your heart and takes you to those places where pain becomes beauty.

Artwork is not synonymous to intention. It is peculiar that although almost everybody says artworks don't give answers, they seem to be sure that a good work asks questions. It sounds like the other side of the same coin to me.

I can see why many visual artists dislike words in artworks. They feel that words dirty the clear water that has to reflect the sky. It disturbs the pleasure of the silent image, the freedom from history, the beauty of nameless forms. (...) I know that neither images nor words, can escape the drunkenness and longing caused by the turning of the world. Words and images drink the same wine. There is no purity to protect.

I like to read about art. It also stimulates me to go and do something totally different in the middle of a sentence, or afterwards, like picking up a paintbrush for example. It is only that due to the overload of art historians, artists and other artrelated people, we are flooded by an overload of insipid writings, to such an extent that when you get to the right thing, you are too tired to read it.

My paintings are not the executions of one idea or emotion that goes from (a) intention to (b) artwork. (Our notions of cause and effect are also in bad shape.) Drawings are closer and quicker in conveying immediate feelings. The more you move towards paintings, the darker the wood becomes through which Little Red Riding Hood goes, and it's not only the wolf but also the wicked with and the seven dwarfs, Judas and Jesus and the journalists, whom she has to face.