Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
A painting is a symbol for the universe. Inside it, each piece relates to the other. Each piece is only answerable to the rest of that little world. So, probably in the total universe, there is that kind of total harmony, but we get only little tastes of it.
There are a lot of artists in Gowanus, and certain things come into your visual vocabulary from living there - the scale of the subway and the canal, sometimes it almost looks like a de Chirico painting, with the intense angles of the shadows and everything.
Most of my work comes from ideas. I can usually do only a few versions of each idea. Land Art and Body Art were particularly strong concepts which allowed for a lot of permutations. But nevertheless, I found myself wanting to move onward into something else.
It might be David Adjaye talking about how the structure of jazz music informs his architecture, it might be the musician Terry Riley talking about how he thinks so much about cinema. I'd love to see more of a rupture between mediums and a flow between them.
Cedars are terribly sensitive to change of time and light - sometimes they are bluish cold-green, then they turn yellow warm-green - sometimes their boughs flop heavy and sometimes float, then they are fairy as ferns and then they droop, heavy as heartaches.
Plastics, as a material, are very nasty, but as an alternative to, let's say, a brick, which seems really natural, they start to look pretty good. They're very low energy to produce, very lightweight to transport and construct. That's why they're so popular.
If you are an artist, you may live with Lincoln. You sit with him, your coat is spread to keep the snow from the grave of Ann Rutledge; you will walk with Washington through the snow and suffer with him as you note the bloodstained footsteps at Valley Forge.
If you have ambitions to go beyond your dreams, you should not seek to copy others' styles, but rather aim to acquire the fundamentals of the timeless principles of academic school, which is a prerequisite for the development of your Uniqueness as an Artist.
The average politician was crooked. That was my ambition, to be a crooked politician. I'd see them in these restaurants, and they'd all hold these conferences. I'd see politicians who were supposed to be on opposite sides of issues all together at one table.
Superman is the hardest character to draw. There are a couple of things that make him difficult. He's got a very simple costume and doesn't have the long cape like Batman. He's not a character that is necessarily always in shadow, and he doesn't have a mask.
I can't imagine a life without thinking, doing art. I don't feel any need to be a world traveler or an adventurer. I'm very happy doing what I'm doing. I think somehow I know that I should have a larger vision of art, but I can't think of what that would be.
I always think of shade as being full of light. That is why I like to use the word shade rather than light and shadow. Shade seems to play over the thing, envelop it, better define it, while shadow seems to fall on the thing and stain the surface with darks.
Art can no longer be art today if it does not reach into the heart of our present culture and work transformatively within it that is, an art which cannot mould society — and through this naturally operate upon the core questions of our society — is not art.
I was trying to release emotions, exercise emotions, and then I entered the art world. Even after grad school, some of [the earlier works] were still lingering in my head. I realized there were some pieces where I felt that I had to respond to the criticism.
My mother was a restorer, she repaired broken things. I don't do that. I destroy things. I cannot go the straight line. I must destroy, rebuild, destroy again. My rhythm is not the same. My mother moved in a straight line: I go from one extreme to the other.
Predominantly in the West, if you can only have creative voices that are either black or white, I'm going to say whatever the f - k I want, because no one's going before you, and if no one's coming after you, I'm just going to be the freakiest of all freaks!
The sovereignty of God is the one impregnable rock to which the suffering human heart must cling. The circumstances surrounding our lives are no accident: they may be the work of evil, but that evil is held firmly within the mighty hand of our sovereign God.
It's very important that young artists push boundaries, because sometimes you have this urge to do something - like the impulsive and dangerous urges I had as a child - and if you don't follow through with it you might miss out on a developmental experience.
I think what interests me the most is when the two things are developed at the same time, which certainly feels natural for the way of working when there is no dialogue. You sort of depend on the music to be that, especially when there's lyrics in the music.
I don't do costumes, I don't do sh_t like that. I love Halloween as a concept, but do I actually go out and do things? No. Trick or treating? Pain in the ass. Hate answering the door all night long. I do love fall, which is bad because I live in Los Angeles.
When the first 'Hellboy' series came out, in the same batch of fan mail I got a letter from somebody from the Church of Satan, and I got a letter from a minister, and they both liked it. And I thought, 'What am I doing that I'm making both these guys happy?'
I usually practice on a small, low wire, that features the predominant wind. I study the meteorology of the place at the time that I am supposed to do my walk, and then I find the predominant direction and velocity of the wind and I train to fight that wind.
I never had a job. I bought my first house within a year of getting out of school, and I built a custom one four and a half years later. The Art Center didn't teach much about business, but I learned a lot from the Fortune 500 companies that were my clients.
This communication alone, by the comparison of the antagonisms, rivalries, movements which give birth to decisive moments, permits the evolution of the soul, whereby a man realizes himself on earth. It is impossible to be concerned with anything else in art.
Now nature is not at variance with art, nor art with nature; they being both the servants of his providence. Art is the perfection of nature. Were the world now as it was the sixth day, there were yet a chaos. Nat, are unconscious of the harmony of creation.
Static puppets, I wanted them to move, they're looking out the windows, but we didn't have time to rig those. I have more ideas than I can execute also every time that I do anything. I put the puppets in because people love 'em. I'm a populist in that sense.
Man's own form in space - his body - was a private prison; and that it was because of this imprisoning misery - because he was hungry and overworked and went to a horrid place called home late at night in the rain, and his bones ached and his head was heavy.
I have a lot left inside. I believe my art will last 500 years, 1,000 years and forever. For me, art is everything. I will strive to create works of art until I die, in the hope that my work will continue to touch the hearts of people even after I have died.
In the studio, I don't do a lot of work that requires repetitive activity. I spend a lot of time looking and thinking and then try to find the most efficient way to get what I want, whether it's making a drawing or a sculpture, or casting plaster or whatever.
It might sound like I'm a dreamer, but economic models have reached their height of evolution. Technology has evolved. What hasn't evolved is mankind's spirituality; everything is from 3,000 years ago. With spirituality comes morals, a better way of thinking.
The artist has the power to signoff the work by deconstructing the work itself: I've finished this work now and I'll sign it and relegate the painting to simply something that services my signature. The painting becomes the colorful backdrop of the signature.
I choose color on the spur of the moment. People ask me why I paint in red. I do not have the slightest idea. I was painting in blue, then I had a need to paint in red. To be able to interact with the medium, this is the key. There are no sure ways to do art.
I feel that every professional is the art school for the next guy. I feel that maybe a lot of the dynamism in my own work, having been felt by the rest of the artists, they'll react to it and put elements of that in their own work, feeling that it'll help it.
I'm in deep in everything, every moment of the day. I create the systems and oversee every aspect of the execution. Every mark on a sculpture and every brush-stroke on a painting is in a controlled situation, exactly as they'd be if I'd have done them myself.
There are a lot of global decisions that you can make as a co-publisher, and only publishers can make those kind of decisions. At the same time, there are some things you can do only as a penciler or creator. I want to keep my hands in both pots, so to speak.
The emphasis on original, individual work in the past years has done a great deal to produce a crop of eccentric fakes and has carried art away from the stream of tradition. Tradition is our heritage of knowledge and experience. We can't get along without it.
It feels like a game, this work I do. It is totally heartfelt, and I love the sticky terrain, the straight-up cartoons, how the irrepressible and icky rise to the surface. But I am not just trying to call forth bugaboos and demons for the sake of it, for fun.
A lot of my friends have been collectors, and I owe a lot to them. I'm always interested in sharing collections and learning that way. I used to trade tapes a lot. I still have a few friends who I trade music with, but it's hard to find the time. I miss that.
I try to create a kind of dynamic thing that hopefully some people will become interested in. And what they do with it after that is sort of up to them. But it's a specific item, it's a specific thing that I've done. And what they do with it is their problem.
One's mind and the earth are in a constant state of erosion, mental rivers wear away abstract banks, brain waves undermine cliffs of thought, ideas decompose into stones of unknowing, and conceptual crystallizations break apart into deposits of gritty reason.
Who wouldn't like to give up normal life? I mean, normal life, you know, is the second worst thing to death itself. I think normality is something that makes everything very static, and I try to make my days, my daily routines, as uneven and rich as possible.
We are against ignorance. We feel that you have to educate yourself, no matter what the situation is. People who refuse to educate themselves - people who refuse to find out what something is about, that they're frightened of - find comfort in being ignorant.
I painted with acrylic paint, and the reason why I went to oil was mainly because I didn't control it. I was looking for the insecurity of it. I mean, I might have found another reason later, but at that moment, the reason was I was looking for the insecurity.
The more religions are fixated on having a dogmatic sense of truth, the more likely they are to blow each other up. So being open to God as a creative principle could provide for a new kind of dialogue between the faiths, which I think is crucial at this time.
the art world has always been an unrelenting taste machine, but now flavors of the month have morphed into flavors of the minute. Again, all a reflection of a wider cultural condition. I mean, the art world is slow compared with the music and movie businesses.
The ideas I'm working with are ideas I'm committed to. I don't know how to soft-shoe them. I don't know how to make them more palpable. I just never knew how to be one of those girls. I wish I knew how to be that sometimes, but I don't know how to be that way.
When I became a professional and fully understood what was going on, I knew that with all the love and care and mentorship that someone like Professor James Herring had given us, was not based on gender; it was based on the notion that he wanted us to succeed.
Composition is the art of arranging in a decorative manner the various elements which the painter uses to express his sentiments. In a picture every separate part will be visible and... everything which has no utility in the picture is for that reason harmful.
A lot of people put out albums with sort of crappy songs and a couple of singles because they know no one's going to listen to it anyway. We very much wanted it to be something that you do listen to from beginning to end and had a narrative that was important.
When I made my first film, Basquiat, I think one of the criticisms was that the way I work is episodic. Later, as people started to look at the movies, they started to realize that maybe that's my style. If I could do it better or another way, I guess I would.