Quote

I knew I wasn't that good a writer, and all I could remember was that I could draw. I'm better at drawing than I am at writing.

Claes Oldenburg

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Claes Oldenburg
Age: 95
Born: 1929
Born: January 28
Designer
Drawer
Graphic Artist
Painter
Performance Artist
Printmaker
Sculptor
Sthlm
Ḳlaʼes Oldenberg
Claes Thure Oldenburg
Remember
Better
Writing
Draw
Good
Drawing
Draws
Writer
Wasn
Knew

More quotes by Claes Oldenburg

Image
I am for an art of things lost or thrown away. . . I am for an art that one smokes like a cigarette. . . I am for an art that flutters like a flag.
Claes Oldenburg
Image
I don't do abstract art because I don't find it as interesting as I do subjects and depictions.
Claes Oldenburg
Image
You can take an object and simply put anything you want in that object, and I accessed that partly through Freudian ideas.
Claes Oldenburg
Image
Ox-Bow was a very free place, very open. You could do whatever you wanted to do.
Claes Oldenburg
Image
Art is a technique of communication. The image is the most complete technique of all communication.
Claes Oldenburg
Image
I am for the art of underwear and the art of taxicabs. I am for the art of ice cream cones dropped on concrete.
Claes Oldenburg
Image
All the fun is locking horns with impossibilities.
Claes Oldenburg
Image
I went back to the Art Institute, then spent the summer at the Ox-Bow School in Saugatuck, Michigan. That's what really awakened me. I made a lot of oil paintings and my first performance.
Claes Oldenburg
Image
I was very happy to be living in New York at that time, more than in the present time. Now it's all commerce.
Claes Oldenburg
Image
My rule was not to paint things as they were. I wasn't copying I was remaking them as my own.
Claes Oldenburg
Image
I got a job as a dishwasher in Oakland, and I would draw all day. It was nice because the lady who ran the boardinghouse where I worked let me live there for nothing if I gave her some drawings every week - mostly park drawings of birds and such.
Claes Oldenburg
Image
Because my work is naturally non-meaningful, the meaning found in it will remain doubtful and inconsistent - which is the way it should be. All that I care about is that, like any startling piece of nature, it should be capable of stimulating meaning.
Claes Oldenburg
Image
I am for an art that takes its form from the lines of life itself, that twists and extends and accumulates and spits and drips, and is heavy and coarse and blunt and sweet and stupid as life itself.
Claes Oldenburg
Image
In 1958 I finally found a large enough apartment on the Lower East Side, where I reverted to figure painting. I drew and painted quite a lot of figures and nudes. People would come and pose for me.
Claes Oldenburg
Image
My work doesn't have the same rules as, say, Andy [Warhol]'s work. But it's gathered together for the simple reason that we all worked with the images and objects around us.
Claes Oldenburg
Image
I am for an art that tells you the time of day, or where such and such a street is. I am for an art that helps old ladies across the street.
Claes Oldenburg
Image
Chicago has a strange metaphysical elegance of death about it.
Claes Oldenburg
Image
Food is like clay you can sculpt with it. Also it has an odor, and you can eat it. I don't eat a lot of cake, but I do make cakes! And unlike the Campbell's Soup Cans, my food is a humanized form and scale.
Claes Oldenburg
Image
The right angle is one of the world's basic shapes.
Claes Oldenburg
Image
I'm in favor of an art that does something other than just sit on its ass in a museum.
Claes Oldenburg