STUCKIST QUOTES

FLOYD ANTHONY ALSBACH, Missouri Valley
If it requires an explanation, it ain't art.
      Artspan.com member forum

RICHARD BLEDSOE, Arizona
Remoderism is the return of art as a revelation. We are showing things about ourselves that can also be universally recognized. Our art symbolically represents flawed, searching humanity participating in birth, existence and death. It is mysterious and moving, comic and tragic, clumsy and elegant. It is a celebration of the beauty and weirdness of life.
      Intereaction. 17.3.11

JOHN BOURNE, Wrexham
A piece of stone with a hole in it isn't the ultimate in art.
      On Henry Moore. Phone conversation 14.12.08

Mark D , Nottingham
Far from being backwards thinking stuckism is just too far forward for the blinkered thinking of many to understand.
      Edgeworth Johnstone Gallery blog 3.1.13

GUY DENNING, Bristol
I'm bitter. I look on it as one of my few positive character traits.
      3ammagazine blog 19.7.06

Who's to say that craft based art isn't 'conceptual'. 'Conceptual' isn't a medium
      Guardian blog 18.10.05 (scroll to bottom)

EAMON EVERALL, London
The Stuckists as a group are not wedded to some formulaic and often stultifying notion of what a painting should look like, as in past movements. For them the unifying element is not visual: it is their overriding and enduring search for emotional veracity and their concern with the authenticity and honesty of the creative impetus.
      A Stuckist on Stuckism 2004

ELLA GURU, London
There is too much conceptual rubbish people have to have an MA in art to understand. My view of art is something random people in the street can understand.
      Detroit News 9.5.01.

PAUL HARVEY, Newcastle
I like to be positive in my work and paint happy pictures because that's how I feel about things. My feeling is that greater consideration and greater respect is given to dark and negative subjects (Emin, Hirst, Freud etc). Work that accentuates the beautiful is considered more throwaway, if not worthless. My argument is that if someone like, say, Freud is praised for showing the ugliness of people then why can't someone be equally praised for representing the beauty?
     Sept 2004

ABBY JACKSON, London
As an emerging artist, I don’t feel stuck at all. I feel like a survivor rather than a casualty of the formulaic work that comes out of London’s art schools each year. I have found my own voice by choosing my own truth as revelation, and I have Stuckism to thank for that.
      Graffiti magazine (now renamed Art in London) Apr-Aug 2007

I always start with an idea. If I don't have that, I don't paint.
      Heyokamagazine Dec 2008

EDGEWORTH JOHNSTONE , London
We demo 2 days a year, paint 363, and the press call us a "protest group".
      Stuck Near Tate Modern, Victoria Press 2010

Stuckism, with more resistance than help from the media and art establishment, includes work I consider amongst the best of the last hundred years.
      Edgeworth Johnstone Gallery 4 January 2013

It may appear the opposite, and ironic, but Stuckism is the most responsive art movement to the changes of the modern world.
      Edgeworth Johnstone Gallery 6 January 2013

JANE KELLY, Acton
I was never given a full reason for my dismissal but also got into trouble by trying to introduce the term "German expressionism" into some copy about the performing dwarves used in the MGM film, The Wizard of Oz, some of whom came from Weimar Germany. The acting feature editor at the time had never heard of such a thing and said "what the fuck is German Expressionism? I have never heard of it and neither have our fucking readers."
     On working at the Daily Mail

It's a canvas called Hated Fathers, and it is going to picture the faces of awful patriarchs. I'm including Earl Haig, who I think was responsible for sending so many young men to their death in the First World War; Chaim Rumkowsky, who ran a ghetto in Poland during the Second World War where all the inhabitants died; Peter the Great, who murdered his son; and Paul Dacre, the editor of the Daily Mail.
     The Independent 2.2.05

BILL LEWIS, Chatham
Descartes' view of intellect was one of parts mentality. The New Paradigm, however, is holistic and about inter-connectedness rather than compartmentalism. We think with our whole person. The mind is free from the bone prison of the skull. We are intellectuals of the heart.
     A Stuckist on Stuckism 2004

I do this because I can’t do anything else and I’ve spent 20 years doing it.
     24 hour museum 17.9.04. On painting.

People are never sure if we are being ironic or not. We are not. We are coming from the heart.
      24 hour museum 17.9.04

PETER McARDLE, Gateshead
I'm no Zen Buddhist, but at the same time my ego never gets between me and the canvas, I even sign them on the reverse.
     22.3.06

TERRY MARKS, New York

Stuckism is not about being stuck in the past but about taking a different fork in the road. It’s been called Re-modernism in the Stuckist Manifesto, and takes the stand that Modernism started off well, but took a wrong turn and disappeared into pure idea like a puff of smoke. So we’re going back to take the untravelled fork-in-the-road to pursue art-making that’s more concrete and accessible to more people, and find out where that leads us.
     NY Arts Sept 2004 (and on her web site)

I have seen a resurgence of 19th century, classical style painting, but the Stuckists don’t do that. We don’t all work in the same style or use the same themes or subject matter. We all choose to be painters, but not as if rock & roll, television, cars, cinema, jazz, and the whole 20th century never happened. We’re saying, “Let’s use paint to describe our lives now.” We’re all interested in working representationally, but not necessarily with realism.
     NY Arts Sept 2004 (and on her web site)

CHARLES THOMSON, London
Critics are usually incapable of understanding Stuckist work just as Victorian critics were incapable of understanding Impressionism when it started
      The Scotsman 28.11.04

The result of walking round Tate Modern is not an experience of the marvel of creative profundity which gives meaning to life, but more akin to the detritus of a dryly analytical bureaucrat reverting to an infantile stage during an extended breakdown.
      Artistica 29.1.06

It looks like doodles done by a lobotomised computer.
     On Tomma Abts, 2006 Turner Prize winner. Quoted in international press

It is only since photography has removed from painting the need to function as documentation of the material that painting has come into its own as the true art form of expression. A photograph is a painting of the outer world. A painting is a photograph of the inner world.

      Guardian blog 14.1.13 (scroll down)

CHARLES THOMPSON, Amherst
Lets face it, pigment on the end of my feather or finger and thrust onto the wall is ancient, self-sufficient, and connected to my brain in a way that photography can never be. I like photography. I love film. But I can't stick them on my finger. The more something is processed the further away it is. Processed things can be very beautiful or interesting. Painting is RIGHT THERE.
      Facebook Stuckism group 19.12.12

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