26 Quotes by Brice Marden

Western art has a certain relationship to nature.

These days people believe they can go into art and make a living. We didn’t have that. The abstract expressionists were older, by the time they even got a show. Now people come right out of school and sell.

I consider myself lucky to have had wonderful teachers. They expose you to a lot and basically teach you how to paint. I think of my career as a series of lucky incidents.

When you’re not smoking anymore, you don’t have to carry around a pack of cigarettes, a lighter – all this paraphernalia. So you’re liberated in a certain sense. It’s the same with drinking.

I remember getting out of grad school and coming to New York and not wanting to get a teaching job because I wanted to work on my own, to develop my own ideas. There isn’t that time now. Artists are exhibiting while they are still in grad school. There isn’t that safety cushion.

Holding together a kind of tension. When you see a painting that’s really good that’s what it’s doing.

You can’t say I’m going to become a painter in the same way you say I’m going to become a dentist. Or maybe you can nowadays. But it’s an endeavor.

Being an artist is very independent thinking, although there’s always going to be a lot of doubt.

Abstraction has always been around, since the drawings in the caves. It exists in all cultures all over the world. I thought for a while that it was going to be the major movement. But people always drift back to realism. I guess there is a certain security in that.