Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I've become increasingly agoraphobic.
My real name - my real name is Jennifer Caban.
I grew up in Far Rockaway and then Long Island.
I'm only the third artist who's ever drawn at Gitmo.
Neutrality and boredom are the weapons of the state.
Art is much more confined by materials than writing is.
No painting is ever not an infinitely reproducible image any more.
I love comics, but I'd rather cut off my thumbs than do nothing but.
You're demonstrating your own skills in a vulnerable way when you draw.
When you hold a graphic novel in your hands, you're holding artist blood made ink.
Rejection is inevitable. Let it hit you hard for a moment, feel the hurt, and then move on.
Mainstream feminism might remember that the war on women always starts with the war on whores.
When you live in New York and are an artist and are interested in people, you meet a lot of people.
Despite everything we know about photo manipulation, a photo is still considered an objective document.
I've just found the stories of the people I'm talking to much more interesting than my reactions to them.
Maybe you shouldn't be working as a jailer in Guantánamo. Maybe that's why you feel spiritually unhealthy.
The problem with doing physically ambitious art is that to view it, you still have to be in your physical body.
I am lucky because I do fine art, and that is half of my living. And then illustration provides the other half.
I absorbed the lie that any smart woman would use birth control and be responsible for her body. Obviously that's not true.
I travel so much that when I'm not traveling, I'm just kind of curled up in a ball here, not wanting to leave or see anyone.
I hated being a child because to be a child means that you are essentially the property of your parents, benevolently or not.
You start like a white blanket and you have to preserve that, and each year that you live chips away at your essential value.
But the thing about proving things? Your jaggedness just goads you on – it makes you sharper and harder. It gives you swagger.
The type of work I do, which is often called 'Pop Surrealism,' is very separate from Gagosian and Mary Boone type of gallery art.
I can't reasonably pretend to be a transparent and omniscient narrator who brings no personal perspective. That person doesn't exist.
If there's a theme in my work, it's that I like to focus on smart people who are facing oppression and who are fighting back against it.
I'm an artist, and I love the visual. Fashion is high art sometimes and hack work other times, but it's something worthy of study and love.
I'm an artist and a journalist. I travel around the world very often for 'Vice Magazine,' and I draw and I write about prisons, about conflict zones.
The main difference between illustration and comics is that comics are much, much more work. Every comics page is the equivalent of six to nine illustrations.
One thing about Guantánamo, beyond anything else, is the commitment against all odds to allow Americans to view themselves as the good guy, no matter what the situation is.
You can't use a drawing to prove a war crime. A drawing doesn't have that notion that it's proof of a reality. Because of that, you can do all sorts of interesting things in it.
I came in as an established artist. People were hiring me for what I did and for who I was. I think that has given me a vast amount of leeway; I feel so lucky that I came in that way.
When I started my own business, I funded it as a naked model. I still think that the sex industry can, for some men and women, be a powerful tool for improving their financial prospects.
I feel like the traditional patron system meant that you would kiss the ass of one rich person and then hide all of the financial goings-on of your work, and you could pretend you were pure.
Sketching is like dancing. It's process as much as product. You can turn your head off and just sort of dissolve into the now. Doing a giant, super thought-out painting is the opposite of that.
The thing that I hate is that Nicholas Kristof style of writing where it's like, "I saw the poor, they made me so sad. What can I do about sadness? I am so brave." It's just like, shut up, man, shut up.
Working as a model liberated me from ever having to hold a day job. I transitioned from doing that to working full-time as an artist. If you're 19 and living cheap, being an artist model can sustain you.
Rohini Mohan read. While she did, I sketched her. She writes with such beauty and violence, and it seemed like the best way to listen was to really watch her, in the way that only drawing someone lets me do.
When virtue was spoken of in the classical sense, for men, it always meant bravery or protecting others or being an adventurer and going out into the world - whereas a woman's virtue meant keeping her legs closed.
I had difficulty being friends with women who hadn't worked in either the sex or beauty industries. I felt like other women sometimes overvalued beauty and sexuality, when in actuality, they're just parts of a job.
The first time I made any money, I was 27. I went to Bergdorf's looking like a proper guttersnipe and bought a pair of Louboutins. I'd wear them and an old ink-stained kimono and make my drawings and feel indomitable.
I was involved in Occupy Wall Street as a participant and poster artist. 'Shell Game' is an attempt to do something bigger, to use whatever artistic powers I have to explore the excitements and betrayals of that year.
New York makes me swoony and in love. The New York of the 1880s was a place where black eye fixers did a brisk business and people were routinely killed for their shoes. But, the constant aspiration of the city never changes.
Innocence is always the state of being untouched. Sometimes it's synonymous with virginity, so sometimes it's quite literal, but sometimes it's more of a mental state of being untouched, of not having seen a lot of the world.
When you're an outsider, you don't have loyalties to anyone, so you can be cruelly honest if need be. The more you get inside, the more you are involved in polite networks of professional coercion that make people less honest.
Different types of sex work are differently supportive. If I were working in a strip club, I would be competing with my colleagues, and while there would be support, there would be financial motivation not to offer too much support.
I didn't want to be beholden to one person. So I did something where I had hundreds of people who backed the work. I could just do work, and since a lot of people were interested in it, I wasn't beholden to any particular one of them.
A lot of things sound neutral, but they're not. A typical example would involve police violence. It's usually forbidden to call police "murderers," even if they're convicted of murder. People will say that it sounds hysterical and unobjective.
My technique of working is I go around with my iPhone and with my sketchbook. I take thousands and thousands and thousands of iPhone photos. I also draw from life. I can draw really, really, really fast. It's a way that I build a rapport with people.
Burlesque girls were alchemists. They were steel-tough performers who were willing to use kitchens as dressing rooms, haul their costume bags through the snow, and go into debt over fake diamonds, all for the five minutes onstage when they were goddesses.