“The painting’s world is only explicable in the sense that it is what you’re looking at. That actual experience is happening to you as you look at the painting. That’s why painters make paintings: to have you be in that place.” -Brice Marden, Cold Mountain
“How you look at a painting physically is very important. A good way to approach a painting is to look at it from a distance roughly equivalent to its height, then double that distance, then go back and look at it in detail whwere you can begin to answer the questions you ’ve posed at each of these various viewing distances. If you go through a museum and you look at a lot of paintings in that way, it’s a like a little dance; it’s almost a ritual of involvement. If you look very carefully from each of these different distances, you create a space that derives from the painting itself as a physical object and a visual field."
– Brice Marden, Cold Mountain
“The artist’s vision is not something that exists, that you know. If you know it and you keep doing what you know, it becomes a familiar road over which you travel until it ceases to be interesting. Instead, with every step toward the vision, questions arise and you pursue those questions. And all the while you’re in the studio, trying to make paintings.” – Brice Marden, Cold Mountain
“To be an artist is not about making individual works. To be an artist is to do your work and let your work express the evolution of a vision. It’s a continuous process for which there is never any full, unqualified reward. You don’t get something done and say, ‘oh, that’s it.’ You get something done and it’s part of a living situation. It isn’t a matter of getting something done, and then getting a number of somethings done, and then making an exhibition and selling the somethings. That’s what happens outside the studio (…)” – Brice Marden, Cold Mountain