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

Categorized in : Direction Work Quality Painting

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

Robert Indiana

poetry long thinking

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

Robert Indiana

tree meaningful people

My goal is that LOVE should cover the world.

Robert Indiana

goal should world

Pop is everything art hasn't been for the last two decades...It springs newborn out of a boredom with the finality and over-saturation of Abstract-Expressionism, which, by its own esthetic logic, is the END of art, the glorious pinnacle of the long pyramidal creative process. Stifled by this rarefied atmosphere, some young painters turn back to some less exalted things like Coca-Cola, ice-cream sodas, big hamburgers, super-markets and 'EAT' signs. They are eye-hungry; they pop.

Robert Indiana

eye spring art

I had no idea LOVE would catch on the way it did. Oddly enough, I wasn't thinking at all about anticipating the Love generation and hippies. It was a spiritual concept. It isn't a sculpture of love any longer. It's become the very theme of love itself.

Robert Indiana

hippie spiritual thinking

Pop art is

Robert Indiana

optimistic dream art

Love is a dangerous commodity-fraught with peril.

Robert Indiana

peril commodity love-is

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

house numbers years

I was the least Pop of all the Pop artists.

Robert Indiana

pops architecture art

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

children years art

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

Robert Indiana

painting realizing done

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

Robert Indiana

word affection hug mother

'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

me terrible mistake love

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

Robert Indiana

better like popularity people

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

Robert Indiana

dive high soar art

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

Robert Indiana

chapter come first many

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

Robert Indiana

ending look american-dream dream

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

words me painting work

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

Robert Indiana

painting color simple time

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

work sky love life