Top 7 Quotes by Fairfield Porter

The right use of color can make any composition work.

The right use of color can make any composition work.

Color, Use, Composition

The profoundest order is revealed in what is most casual.

Art, Order, Drawing

Joan Ludman, Fairfield Porter (2001). “Fairfield Porter: A Catalogue Raisonné of the Paintings, Watercolors, and Pastels”

Order seems to come from searching for disorder, and awkwardness from searching for harmony or likeness, or the following of a system. The truest order is what you already find there, or that will be given if you don't try for it. When you arrange, you fail.

Fairfield Porter

Order, Trying, Failing

Fairfield Porter, Ted Leigh, Justin Spring (2005). “Material witness: the selected letters of Fairfield Porter”, Univ of Michigan Pr

I was never one to paint space, I paint air.

Fairfield Porter

Space, Air, Paint

Subject matter must be normal in the sense that it does not appear sought after so much as simply happening to one.

Fairfield Porter

Doe, Matter, Normal

If you are vain it is vain to sign your pictures and vain not to sign them. If you are not vain it is not vain to sign them and not vain not to sign them.

Fairfield Porter

Vanity, Vain, Ifs

There is that elementary principle of organization in any art that nothing gets in anything else's way, and everything is at its own limit of possibilities.

Fairfield Porter

Art, Order, Organization

Fairfield Porter, Rackstraw Downes (1979). “Fairfield Porter: art in its own terms : selected criticism, 1935-1975”, Taplinger Publishing Company