Agnes Martin Quotes

When I think of art I think of beauty. Beauty is the mystery of life. It is not in the eye it is in the mind. In our minds there is awareness of perfection.

Beauty is in the mind, not the eye.

Happiness is being on the beam with life--to feel the pull of life.

The way of an artist is an entirely different way. It is a way of surrender.

You sort of underestimate the human being when you say that every least thing that is an abstract experience is spiritual. It isn't. It's just your real self. You can be capable of fantastic abstract experiences, right in this life.

Of all the pitfalls in our paths and the tremendous delays and wanderings off the track I want to say that they are not what they seem to be. I want to say that all that seems like fantastic mistakes are not mistakes, all that seems like error is not error; and it all has to be done. That which seems like a false step is the next step.

What does freedom mean? Who is it for? What role does the state play in its preservation or curtailment? Can it be achieved by asserting the rights of the body, or, as the painter Agnes Martin believed, by denying the body altogether?

I don’t believe in influence. I think that in order to be an artist, you have to move. When you stop moving, then you’re no longer an artist. And if you move from somebody else’s position, you simply cannot know the next step. I think that everyone is on his own line. I think that after you’ve made one step, the next step reveals itself. I believe that you were born on this line. I don’t say that the actual footsteps were marked before you get to them, and I don’t say that change isn’t possible in your course. But I do believe we unfold out of ourselves, and we do what we are born to do sooner or later, anyway.

AGNES MARTIN-LUGAND „SZCZĘŚLIWI LUDZIE CZYTAJĄ KSIĄŻKI I PIJĄ KAWĘ

143Happiness is being on the beam with life--to feel the pull of life.

Guess what most families on our street have: (a) a swimming pool (b) tennis courts (c) a cook named Agnes (d) all of the above. The answer is (d) all of the above.

One untitled Agnes Martin painting had been hanging in the gallery since October. I would go there in the morning and stare at it. Every day at around nine o’clock, pale sunlight radiated on the painting just so, and its surface would glow, weightless and pale and supernatural as sea-foam. When I looked at the painting then, I thought: This is it. It wasn’t gold that was the sublime material, the magic matter; it was the surface itself. The stuff in between. The birth of the world. I’d found it. It was here.

I paint with my back to the world.” —Agnes Martin

Un todo con su recuerdo del prolongado avasallamiento por parte del maligno. Un todo con su recuerdo, su persistente sentido, de aquel luminoso tabernáculo oculto en su alma infantil, donde la luz transformaba su agonía en valor y le permitía seguir luchando. De algún modo sabía, aunque todavía no lo comprendía, que en aquel tabernáculo interior era donde Agnes realmente vivía. Aquel centro de su existencia era un refugio intocable donde residía la fuerza, el amor y la confianza, el lugar donde la víctima sufridora, el verdadero objetivo del asalto que se perpetraba contra Agnes, había santificado para siempre la agonía de la niña unida a la suya.

Agnes Martin to Robert Ryman,