Collected Meditations
Showing 9 quotesI like to treat paint as material - to daub it, drop it, let it slide. There was Action Painting, but I also compare it to paint effects found on the streets. This approach is superimposed on a sculptural surface that is also 'painterly.'— Claes Oldenburg
If you really want to be an artist, you search yourself, and you find a lot of it comes from earlier times. I have pretty much built the work around my experiences. When I've moved from one place to another, the work has changed.— Claes Oldenburg
A life cycle can be imposed on an object. An object can be very energetic and active, and then it has a dying phase and a phase of decomposition.— Claes Oldenburg
My struggle has been to return painting to the tangible object, which is like returning the personality to touching and feeling the world around it, to offset the tendency to vagueness and abstraction. To remind people of practical activity, to suggest the sense and not to escape from the senses.— Claes Oldenburg
I think of a monument as being symbolic and for the people and therefore rhetorical, not honest, not personal.— Claes Oldenburg