Top 90 Walter Darby Bannard Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Big minds have big ideas. Small minds use big ideas to justify bad ideas.”

— Walter Darby Bannard

2. “Truth is not always hard to find; it is often staring you in the face. The problem with truth is that it is hard to believe. It is even harder to get other people to believe.”

— Walter Darby Bannard

3. “Start a painting with fresh ideas, and then let the painting replace your ideas with its ideas.”

— Walter Darby Bannard

4. “Good art looks new because the artist has recombined something old to make something better.”

— Walter Darby Bannard

5. “When you ‘break all the barriers’ you get a pile of rubble.”

— Walter Darby Bannard

6. “Making art is like swimming underwater in a blindfold.”

— Walter Darby Bannard

7. “When making a painting, only one thing counts: what you do next.”

— Walter Darby Bannard

8. “When you make the obvious mysterious, then the mysterious becomes unavailable.”

— Walter Darby Bannard

9. “An ivory tower is a fine place as long as the door is open.”

— Walter Darby Bannard

10. “Art is like a butterfly fluttering in a meadow. Analysis of art is like a butterfly on a pin. Each has its value, but we must always be aware of the difference, and what is gained or lost.”

— Walter Darby Bannard

11. “Postmodernism is Modernism with Alzheimer’s.”

— Walter Darby Bannard

12. “Assumptions are usually presumptuous but often correct.”

— Walter Darby Bannard

13. “In ART as in Life the Best Way to REMEDY mistakes is to take advantage of them.”

— Walter Darby Bannard

14. “Most ‘profound truths’ are just timely ideas.”

— Walter Darby Bannard

15. “There’s a big difference between grabbing attention and rewarding attention.”

— Walter Darby Bannard

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

— Walter Darby Bannard

17. “When good ideas get put to bad use, it is the fault of the user, not the idea.”

— Walter Darby Bannard

18. “Of course I will look at anything, but I have not got the time or the patience to keep on looking at art that I know could be better. I don’t want art that needs fixing, I want art that sends me back to the studio to fix my own.”

— Walter Darby Bannard

19. “When anything goes, everything goes.”

— Walter Darby Bannard

20. “Too much freedom inhibits choice. Constructive narrowness clarifies choice.”

— Walter Darby Bannard

21. “Most people find facts irritating. Facts interfere with their systems of denial.”

— Walter Darby Bannard

22. “Always let intuitive perception precede analysis.”

— Walter Darby Bannard

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

— Walter Darby Bannard

24. “Originality is way overrated. To make, you need to take. All great artists do.”

— Walter Darby Bannard

25. “Art is not truth. Truth conforms to reality. Art invents reality.”

— Walter Darby Bannard

26. “Talent is like a seed which needs fertile soil. There is no less talent now, there is less fertile soil to nourish it.”

— Walter Darby Bannard

27. “Postmodernism does not help us understand good art. It encourages art that can be easily understood and throws in something catchy to cover the loss of mystery.”

— Walter Darby Bannard

28. “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.”

— Walter Darby Bannard

29. “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.”

— Walter Darby Bannard

30. “When inspiration dies, imitation thrives.”

— Walter Darby Bannard

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

— Walter Darby Bannard

32. “Art is making something better without knowing what better is until you make it.”

— Walter Darby Bannard

33. “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.”

— Walter Darby Bannard

34. “Don’t burden art with words and ideas. Art comes from a deeper place.”

— Walter Darby Bannard

35. “When you write something new about science, other scientists may not like it but they pay attention because it is subject to proof. When you write something new about art, it is subject only to the reader’s discomfort, and will probably be rejected.”

— Walter Darby Bannard

36. “Science is a matter of adjusting language to explain material reality. Art is a matter of adjusting material reality to create a sense of life.”

— Walter Darby Bannard

37. “Art is not ‘about.’ Art is.”

— Walter Darby Bannard

38. “Limitation of means is a precondition of excellence. Creative freedom chooses its limitations. Destructive freedom rejects them heedlessly.”

— Walter Darby Bannard

39. “When you are painting a landscape, assume the painting is real and the landscape is an illusion.”

— Walter Darby Bannard

40. “The first duty of intelligence is to recognize the obvious.”

— Walter Darby Bannard

41. “Without the eye, the head is blind. Without the head, the eye is adrift.”

— Walter Darby Bannard

42. “Complete freedom debilitates art but reveals much about character.”

— Walter Darby Bannard

43. “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.”

— Walter Darby Bannard

44. “The more freedom artists have to do what they want to do, the more they do what other artists are doing.”

— Walter Darby Bannard

45. “If you learn something too well, it will get in the way of your perception of reality.”

— Walter Darby Bannard

46. “Experience is real. Painting, which comes out of experience, is real. The world is an illusion.”

— Walter Darby Bannard

47. “Anything is OK in art if the art turns out OK.”

— Walter Darby Bannard

48. “The struggle to be original hates conformity, but the struggle to be better disregards it, or takes advantage of it to build workable conventions.”

— Walter Darby Bannard

49. “When you have made a good painting, don’t do another like it, but remember the process, what you did, what you were thinking and feeling.”

— Walter Darby Bannard

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

— Walter Darby Bannard