Joan Miro Quotations

For me an object is something living. This cigarette or this box of matches contains a secret life much more intense than that of certain human beings.

The works must be conceived with fire in the soul but executed with clinical coolness.

I try to apply colors like words that shape poems, like notes that shape music.

Throughout the time in which I am working on a canvas I can feel how I am beginning to love it, with that love which is born of slow comprehension.

What I am looking for... is an immobile movement, something which would be the equivalent of what is called the eloquence of silence, or what St. John of the Cross, I think it was, described with the term 'mute music'.

My characters have undergone the same process of simplification as the colors. Now that they have been simplified, they appear more human and alive than if they had been represented in all their details.

I feel the need of attaining the maximum of intensity with the minimum of means. It is this which has led me to give my painting a character of even greater bareness.

You can look at a picture for a week an never think of it again. You can also look at a picture for a second and think of it all your life.

I work like a gardener.

I begin my pictures under the effect of a shock which I feel and which makes me escape from reality... I need a point of departure, even if it's only a speck of dust or a flash of light.

I throw down the gauntlet to chance. For example, I prepare the ground for a picture by cleaning my brush over the canvas. Spilling a little turpentine can also be helpful.

The more ignoble I find life, the more strongly I react by contradiction, in humour and in an outburst of liberty and expansion.

For me, a picture should be like sparks. It must dazzle like the beauty of a woman or a poem. It must have radiance; it must be like those stones which Pyrenean shepherds use to light their pipes.

The picture should be fecund. It must bring a world to birth.

I believe that to do anything in this world one needs a love for risk and adventure, and above all, to be able to do without what middle-class families call "future."

Painting must be fertile. It must give birth to a world.. ..it must fertilize the imagination.

That which interests me above all else is the calligraphy of a tree or the tiles of a roof, and I mean leaf by leaf, branch by branch, blade by blade of grass.

A modeled form is less striking than one which is not. Modeling prevents shock and limits movement to the visual depth. Without modeling or chiaroscuro depth is limitless: movement can stretch to infinity.

I want to assassinate painting,

My tendency towards bareness and simplification has been practiced in three fields: modeling, colors, and the figuration of the personages.

I work like a labourer on a farm or in a vineyard. Things come to me slowly. My vocabulary of forms, for instance, has not been the discovery of a day. It took shape in spite of myself... That is why I am always working on a hundred different things at the same time.

The spectacle of the sky overwhelms me. Im overwhelmed when I see, in an immense sky, the crescent of the moon, or the sun. There, in my pictures, tiny forms in huge empty spaces. Empty spaces, empty horizons, empty plains - everything which is bare has always greatly impressed me.

Art class was like a religious ceremony to me. I would wash my hands carefully before touching paper or pencils. The instruments of work were sacred objects to me.

What I will no longer accept is the mediocre life of a modest little gentleman.

Painting or poetry is made as one makes love - a total embrace, prudence thrown to the winds, nothing held back.

I begin painting and as I paint the picture begins to assert itself, or suggest itself, under my brush. The form becomes a sign for a woman or a bird as I work... The first stage is free, unconscious... the second stage is carefully calculated.

I make no distinction between poetry and painting.

I start from something considered dead and arrive at a world. And when I put a title on it, it becomes even more alive.

For me, a painting must give off sparks. It must dazzle like the beauty of a woman or a poem.

The simplest things give me ideas.

A simple line painted with the brush can lead to freedom and happiness.

As regards my means of expression, I try my hardest to achieve the maximum of clarity, power, and plastic aggressiveness; a physical sensation to begin with, followed up by an impact on the psyche.

When I stand before a canvas, I never know what I'll do, and I am the first one surprised at what comes out.

If you have any notion of where you are going, you will never get anywhere.

What I am seeking... is a motionless movement, something equivalent to what is called the eloquence of silence...

The more I work, the more I want to work.

My way is to seize an image the moment it has formed in my mind, to trap it as a bird and to pin it at once to canvas. Afterward I start to tame it, to master it. I bring it under control and I develop it.

I think of my studio as a vegetable garden, where things follow their natural course. They grow, they ripen. You have to graft. You have to water.

Never, never do I set to work on a canvas in the state it comes in from the shop. I provoke accidents - a form, a splotch of color. Any accident is good enough. I let the matiere decide. Then I prepare a ground by, for example, wiping my brushes on the canvas. Letting fall some drops of turpentine on it would do just as well. If I want to make a drawing I crumple the sheet of paper or I wet it; the flowing water traces a line and this line may suggest what is to come next.

Little by little, I've reached the stage of using only a small number of forms and colors. It's not the first time that painting has been done with a very narrow range of colors. The frescoes of the tenth century are painted like this. For me, they are magnificent things.

Poetry and painting are done in the same way you make love; it's an exchange of blood, a total embrace - without caution, without any thought of protecting yourself.

You can look at a picture for a week and never think of it again. You can also look at the picture for a second and think of it all your life.

To gain freedom is to gain simplicity.

More important than a work of art itself is what it will sow. Art can die, a painting can disappear. What counts is the seed.

The painting rises from the brushstrokes as a poem rises from the words. The meaning comes later.