13 Quotes by Joseph Plaskett

Art is a celebration of life, intended by the artist to put the spectator in touch with the divine.

All paintings start with concept, which is another word for image or imagination. The mistake is to isolate the concept as if the idea did not need to be given permanent form.

Cubism came about because, in the process of analyzing form, something that lay in the form, a plane, could be lifted out to float on its own...

The art of painting is entering a new golden age. It is in no danger of becoming obsolete.

All that is happening in art is part of a process of exploration and discovery. I hope to live for a few more years so that I can catch glimpses of the oncoming future.

My zest for exhibition has over a long career become increasingly a mania. The ecstasy I feel as I survey work I have done I want to share with the world – not the whole world which couldn’t care less, but my private world, which is my country, Canada.

The art that I make and that I see others make confirms the miracle of being alive. Almost every day I live in a state of exaltation. The art of painting is to me sacred. It is central to all the other visual arts. This art is in a constant state of renewal.

Sometimes, at a certain point, the painting seems to have painted itself without my help – what I have called the ‘eureka’ moment when a sudden daring intervention has worked a miracle.

An aged painter cannot help but accept the fact that his work belongs in the past. Younger painters have leaped into the phenomenon called contemporary, where it would be foolish of me to try to enter. But I can claim my own phenomenon...