Alice Neel Quotes

Alice Neel shares gritty reflections on modern life and the pressures of the New York rat race.

13 quotes

1. I love to paint people torn by all the things they are torn by today in the rat race in New York.

2. You can't leave humanity out. If you didn't have humanity, you wouldn't have anything.

3. All experience is great providing you live through it. If it kills you, you've gone too far.

4. Lucky for me, as old as I am, I can still change.

5. When women finally get liberated, they'll do the same that men do - dog eat dog - that's what our culture is...

6. Whether I'm painting or not, I have this overweening interest in humanity. Even if I'm not working, I'm still analyzing people.

7. I do not pose my sitters. I do not deliberate and then concoct... Before painting, when I talk to the person, they unconsciously assume their most characteristic pose, which in a way involves all their character and social standing - what the world has done to them and their retaliation.

8. When I was in my studio I didn't give a damn what sex I was... I thought art is art.

9. If you're sufficiently tenacious and interested, you can accomplish what you want to accomplish in this world.

10. Nobody knows what makes good art. As an artist, when it happens, you're grateful, and then you get on with it.

11. Like Chekhov, I am a collector of souls... if I hadn't been an artist, I could have been a psychiatrist.

12. I know all the theory of everything but when I paint I don't think of anything except the subject and me.

13. I thought you had to give up a lot for art, and you did. It required complete concentration. It also required that whatever money you had had to be put into art materials.