Robert Indiana Quotes

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Robert Indiana

Profession : Artist

Birth : September 13, 1928

Love is a dangerous commodity - fraught with peril.

Robert Indiana

My art is a disciplined high dive - high soar, simultaneous & polychromous, an exaltation of the verbal-visual... my dialogue.

Robert Indiana

Some people like to paint trees. I like to paint love. I find it more meaningful than painting trees.

Robert Indiana

I think of my peace paintings as one long poem, with each painting being a single stanza.

Robert Indiana

I realize that protest paintings are not exactly in vogue, but I've done many.

Robert Indiana

I paint the American scene.

Robert Indiana

It would be my intention that everybody should have love, and there are a lot of people in the world.

Robert Indiana

I've always been fascinated by numbers. Before I was seventeen years old, I had lived in twenty-one different houses. In my mind, each of those houses had a number.

Robert Indiana

I never had the exposure to techniques and so forth that children have today with art workshops, but I always had crayons and pencils and still have work going right back to when I was five or six years old.

Robert Indiana

Many, many of my paintings have come from the first chapter of Moby Dick.

Robert Indiana

'LOVE' bit me. It was a marvelous idea, but it was also a terrible mistake. It became too popular; it became too popular.

Robert Indiana

There are people who don't like popularity. It's much better to be exclusive and remote.

Robert Indiana

'Hug' is my mother's word for affection.

Robert Indiana

The American Dream - that's our folly. That's our folly. Look where we're ending up.

Robert Indiana

The messages that my work might contain, the verbal aspects, the use of words, certainly I never mean for it to be more than - shall we say? - fifty percent of the total, and sometimes my active interest is much less than that. It is the formal aspect of my painting which fascinates me most.

Robert Indiana

The actual technique, the process of painting flat color and simple geometric edges, all dates from my time here on Coenties Slip.

Robert Indiana

When I was painting portraits and - shall we say? - rather allegorical heads, which is the figurative work which immediately preceded the direction I have since gone, these images were always of a very fixed, rigid quality, and, of course, my work still has this aspect.

Robert Indiana

When I was a kid, my mother used to drive my father to work in Indianapolis, and I would see, practically every day of my young life, a huge Phillips 66 sign. So it is the red and green of that sign against the blue Hoosier sky. The blue in the 'Love' is cerulean. Therefore, my 'Love' is an homage to my father.

Robert Indiana

There are only two people in 'Eat' - myself and my favorite cat, Pachiki - and for 40 minutes, I eat one mushroom.

Robert Indiana

I didn't think much about Marsden Hartley until very recently, but Gertrude Stein found him to be the best American painter in Europe at the time she was alive. I consider my tributes to him my most important works.

Robert Indiana