29 Quotes by Eric Fischl

Be the holder of your own Nature. It is a joyful responsibility.

Art should create an experience.

There's actually a disdain for the conversation about audience in the art world. Artist to artist, if you say, "What do you think about audience?" they would probably say, "I don't think about audience, I only think about my work," yet the audience is such an important part.

I don't think my work is so much about opening up wounds. I think it's about understanding the nature of the wound. I'm not bleeding on the canvas. I, like most people, have suffered traumatic events. The character of a person's life is determined by the way they deal with those events. I am a creative person and I deal with it creatively.

Artists of my generation were not educated. We were not given the equipment because it was generally believed to be irrelevant.

Abstraction is an esoteric language.

Personally, I never believe an artist saying "I do it for myself" is saying the truth, because why would you go through the trouble of making something that goes out into the world if you didn't care about somebody else seeing it? It's like the difference between those who choose "more comfortably termed entertainment" versus what people think of as the "art life," which is supposedly more monastic or spiritual. I don't believe in those distinctions.

A precision of composition and figuration is what I'm working toward. I've always felt viewers should have an experience without having to ask what the hell is was about.

If you worry about how good the art is, you're never going to make your own art.