Quotes from Walter Darby Bannard

We must turn away from work that replaces experience and pleasure with explanation.

Many years ago, Clement Greenberg said, 'All profoundly original work looks ugly at first.' This should be updated now to 'All profoundly ugly work looks original at first.

Making art is like swimming underwater in a blindfold.

No high-minded painter of the last fifty years has been able to come to terms with his art without coming to terms with the problem of cubism.

Art flows more easily when you are not thinking about what 'should' be in it or how it 'should' be done. The Impressionists taught us to look and see, not assume.

Don't apologize, justify or rationalize bad art or bad writing. If you do, you are part of it.

Asking art to express ideas is like asking a Sumo wrestler to play charades.

The art consensus is not criteria, it is convenience.

To an art historian a Giotto is a 14th Century painting. To an artist it was painted yesterday. We free ourselves from the past when we see it freshly.

Most art is just surface noise.

Very few people ever understand art. If you are lucky, they will buy it for the wrong reasons.

Good new art may not look like art. Inspiration doesn't follow style, it creates it.

Postmodernism does not facilitate better art. It rationalizes inferior art by wrapping it in words - a suit of armor with nobody inside.

Conceptual art' is an oxymoron. Concepts are articulations of fact or supposition, not attributes of quality.

If art depended on content, then one painting of an apple would be as good as the next one.

Don't burden art with words and ideas. Art comes from a deeper place.

If we see an object as a bowl, it may inhibit seeing it as craft, just as seeing it as craft might inhibit seeing it as art. See first; name later.

Anything is OK in art if the art turns out OK.

It matters little if something is 'craft' or 'art.' The question is only this: does it give me pleasure?

There are too many artists, too many dealers and too much art.

Art that wants to be felt does not have the need to be admired.

There is no best way to make art, but there are a lot of better ways.

The power of art is not in communication but effect; what it does, not what it relates.

Assumptions are usually presumptuous but often correct.