Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Art is for the elite because it has a very high price-point of entry. And when one is in that social strata, they look down at illustrators because they just draw things directly for a few hundred dollars, and that's seen as being a bit grubby. Galleries allow artists to stay relatively divorced from the financial aspects of their trade.
My drawing came out of editorial-style cartoons. Music was one thing and art was another, and there weren't really any standards for my art. My work was just drawings. They weren't done with any aspirations of becoming a part of punk scene. They weren't about punk. They were just collections of drawings, some of which I xeroxed and sold.
I was making my work as transparent as possible, without equivocations, without calling attention to itself, without apology. There's a lot of conventions in the art world that are not to be transgressed, but my economy of means doesn't abide by those strictures. There's no reason to abide by them. I don't have any vested interest in it.
Everything we see hides another thing, we always want to see what is hidden by what we see. There is an interest in that which is hidden and which the visible does not show us. This interest can take the form of a quite intense feeling, a sort of conflict, one might say, between the visible that is hidden and the visible that is present.
The area between the nose and the chin, the subject of kissing and the vehicle for speech, is perhaps even more known and set upon than the eyes. The mouth is also riddled with a complex interweaving of folds, curves, flats and lost-and-found edges. These nuances are needed by a perceptive person who might try to understand human nature.
A unifying factor between the different traditions and lineages of Tantra, is that it is feminine in nature. It acknowledges the feminine as the basis from which all the practices spring. Therefore, Tantra is by its nature, the understanding that all phenomenal existence, the universe, or cosmos, that we experience is feminine in nature.
Through the history of art we can see through the emotional life, and sometimes the financial security of some of the artists, some transformation. And I really believe that it's generally about the same kind of transformation and the same kind of reaction. We are a little bit less individual than we would like to believe or guess we are.
I realize that this is not what you want to put on a cover with Wonder Woman emblazoned on it. She could be in trouble, but she doesn't need to be completely out of control. So whenever I'm doing these covers, I try to make sure that there's an element where, even if there is danger, it's not something where agency is taken away from her.
There is none of that feeling about art that you meet everywhere in Europe. There you will hear people say, 'Oh, you must see such-and-such a statue at 4 o'clock in the afternoon; then the light is beautiful,' or, 'See this monument in the early morning; the light is best for it then.' Do you ever hear anything like that from an American?
For me narcissism is not about money. For me, narcissism is something so romantic and something so human. Everybody is a narcissist. Some people admit it and some people don't. As an artist, it's important to be a narcissist. Look at Picasso, look at Warhol.... As an artist, you can get away with a lot of things that normal people cannot.
The world will see many fashions of art and most of the world will follow the fashions and make none. These cults - these 'movements' - are absolutely necessary, or at any rate their causes are, for somewhere in their centres are the ones who bear the Idea, the ones who have questioned, 'But what do I think?' and 'How shall I say it best?
With just one polka dot, nothing can be achieved. In the universe, there is the sun, the moon, the earth, and hundreds of millions of stars. All of us live in the unfathomable mystery and infinitude of the universe. Pursuing philosophy of the universe through art under such circumstances has led me to what I call stereotypical repetition.
I always believed that my work should be unfinished in the sense that I encourage people to add their creativity to it, either conceptually or physically. Back in the 1960s, I was calling for 'Unfinished Music,' number one, and number two, with my artwork - I was taking unfinished work into the gallery. And that's how I was looking at it.
Warhol and other Pop artists had brought the art religion of art for art's sake to an end. If art was only business, then rock expressed that transcendental, religious yearning for communal, nonmarket esthetic feeling that official art denied. For a time during the seventies, rock culture became the religion of the avant-garde art world.
My office has two buildings that function like the right and left sides of the brain. There's a room where everything is being edited for an upcoming project, but you can pull out of that into a tranquil space to work in a different, more solitary medium. It's an architectural unfolding of the process instead of just one chaotic structure.
I get a lot of comics, and I can look at a comic and tell immediately whether I'll enjoy it or not. There are elements in the stories that I have no rapport with. I see dirty language, I see sleazy backgrounds; I see it reflected in the movies, the movies are comics to me. And I don't see a sleazy world. I see hope. I see a positive world.
Everything is mediated. Everything is influenced by its maker. And happily, right? I'm so happy everyone leaves fingerprints on things whether they like it or not. Fingerprints solve crimes. They're profound. They're your best and worst friend and you were born with them and you can't get away from them without a lot of pain and sandpaper.
It has been difficult to hold onto many paintings but I have retained a few. Possibly the current favorite is titled 'Big Band' completed in 2005. It measures 13 feet x 9 feet. It has 18 nearly life size recognizable portraits of the biggest jazz stars that I knew and saw perform in the 1950s, '60s, '70s, '80s and includes Wynton Marsalis.
When mayors get together they probably have better conversations and have better notes to share about running different cities, and just do what suits. Basically, like when you combine all the religions and take the best bits, you should be able to combine all the cities and take the best bits, the information, the tried and tested things.
I do everything by hand... Even if I'm doing really big letters and I spend a lot of time going over the line and over the line and trying to make it straight, I'll never be able to make it straight. From a distance it might look straight, but when you get close up, you can always see the line waver. And I think that's where the beauty is.
I will say without reservations that from my point of view there can be no abstractions. Any shape or area that has not the pulsating concreteness of real flesh and bones, its vulnerability to pleasure or pain is nothing at all. Any picture that does not provide the environment in which the breath of life can be drawn does not interest me.
I've just always liked monsters, since I was a little kid. It was always the thing I found interesting. It's always what I wanted to draw; it's always what I wanted to read, and so, yeah, I don't know. It's a good question for a therapist, why I like monsters. But I tend to not question it. It's what pays the bills, so that's kind of nice.
On to the Next Dream became about much more than me facing a challenging situation; it became about how all of us feel when we're thrust unexpectedly into change. It's about how we all hold onto personalized visions of our lives, our city, and our culture, and what we do when reality forces us to confront the impermanence of those visions.
In those days, a gay man was made to feel nothing but shame about his feelings and his sexuality. I wanted my drawings to counteract that, to show gay men being happy and positive about who they were. Oh, I didn't sit down to think this all out carefully. But I knew - right from the start - that my men were going to be proud and happy men!
Hello Kitty is an icon that doesn't stand for anything at all. Hello Kitty never has been, and never will be, anything. She's pure license; you can even get a Hello Kitty car! The branding thing is completely out of control, but it started as nothing and maintains its nothingness. It's not about the ego, and in that way it's very Japanese.
For me, what was important was to record everything I saw around me, and to do this as methodically as possible. In these circumstances a good photograph is a picture that comes as close as possible to reality. But the camera never manages to record what your eyes see, or what you feel at the moment. The camera always creates a new reality.
People constantly describe me as a formalist or even a minimalist, but I'm not really bothered with the rules of painting or the history of painting. My approach is that everything is mine. I take what I can use from wherever, and then I forget where I've taken it from. But there is no point me making anything that looks like anyone else's.
The design of the gum is expressed in the flow of it trunk and limbs, and the design of the European tree mainly in its foliage. In Europe great masses of foliage first attract the eye, here the limbs and trunk, which, on account of their proportion and colour, make themselves felt first, and one thinks of the foliage as a secondary matter.
Nature contains the elements, in colour and form, of all pictures, as the keyboard contains the notes of all music. But the artists is born to pick, and choose, and group with science, these elements, that the result may be beautiful - as the musician gathers his notes, and forms his chords, until he brings forth from chaos glorious harmony
I've often looked at the extremes as a way to shed light on the mainstream. Even though everybody says, "Money doesn't buy you happiness," I don't think that that's the principle by which people live. If you talk to kids and ask them what they want to be when they grow up, they say, "Rich and famous," but being rich and famous is not a job.
We imagine going to the moon and planting a flag, going to an asteroid and mining, going to Mars and setting up a colony. And I think that expansionist mentality is very self-destructive, especially given the kind of precarious relationship we now have to the ecosystem here on Earth, because it allows us to imagine that Earth is disposable.
The lucid dream, located as it is at a crossroads between worlds and states of consciousness, places the magician in a unique position to influence the delicate balance of consciousness and the interplay it has on matter in the waking state, and is thus an opportunity to test one's ability in the art of adjusting the mutable fabric of Maya.
This seclusion of the artist with his work, sometimes misconceived as a selfish thing, is in truth as needful a tool as any, if a vision is to be made clear to others. And all the men I have known do creative work obtained it; either mechanically, by the walls of a workroom, or by that withdrawal into themselves which is part of their power.
Seurat and Signac mixed paintings with the dry and abstract laws of science. This approach, in my opinion, usually strays from the purpose of art in general. Because it means that one cannot expect from an artifact, that is created with mathematical laws, to establish an improbable and irrational relationship between the work and the viewer.
I suspect that most people in the world will travel through or at least wish to travel through Miami in their lifetimes. I think it is on the same level as seeing the pyramids in Giza for many people. But, Miami is slippery: It is a place that is always that distant orgiastic green light while also being a hot, tropical, and very real place.
A total work of art is only possible in the context of the whole of society. Everyone will be a necessary co-creator of a social architecture, and, so long as anyone cannot participate, the ideal form of democracy has not been reached. Whether people are artists, assemblers of machines or nurses, it is a matter of participating in the whole.
A close friend of mine described me as a radical pragmatist. I embrace this no-nonsense distinction wholeheartedly. It is a character trait that matches the sense of myself I've had from as far back as I can remember. I am not one who goes in much for magical thinking. I don't believe in destiny, fate, or things like divine guidance, either.
I present the thing we're going to do as a simple starting point. They all know it's an art piece and that it's all going to be recorded. And I have never had an experience where one of these men tried to take advantage of the situation. If they were guilty of anything it was of being lonely. It was never that they were violent or dangerous.
Painting is the most beautiful of all arts. In it, all sensations are condensed, at its aspect everyone may create romance at the will of his imagination, and at a glance have his soul invaded by the most profound memories, no efforts of memory, everything summed up in one moment. Complete art which sums up all the others and completes them.
I want labor to be the point, because everything in our lives is miraculously made with no idea of how it's done. As an active and critical consumer, and as someone who has attempted to make the flawless and failed, I wanted a transparency of construction here. If we know how it is made and how it falls apart, we will know how to rebuild it.
Shapeshifting requires the ability to transcend your attachments, in particular your ego attachments to identity and who you are. If you can get over your attachment to labeling yourself and your cherishing of your identity, you can be virtually anybody. You can slip in and out of different shells, even different animal forms or deity forms.
Art should be independent of all clap-trap - should stand alone, and appeal to the artistic sense of eye or ear, without confounding this with emotions entirely foreign to it, as devotion, pity, love, patriotism and the like. All these have no kind of concern with it; and that is why I insist on calling my works 'arrangements' and 'harmonies.
When I was younger I was very opinionated about art. And then, I realized that I kind of recognized this pattern where the things that I was vehemently of pissed off about, I would end up loving them two years later. So I just tried to mellow out. Like there's art that I think is pretty silly, but it doesn't get under my skin like it used to.
One could think of a person who seems to have two opposing and contradictory sides to his personality; but it turns out that in the end the two sides are complementary. The same happens with an artist's work: deep down, what appear as contradictory sides are merely different registers, different aspects of the reality that the artist inhabits
I use dull colors in my drawings because I started out using a root beer base, because it seemed like an interesting idea, and when it turned out that it worked quite well as an ink, I started using other colors that would complement it, like grays from Higgins black writing ink and, more recently, Dr. P.H. Martin's olive green and vermilion.
I had some highlight moments in the early '60s when I used to do a lot of rubbings. I used Afta; it's an amazing chemical. If you pour it on something and rub, you get amazing results. Before that, I used lighter fluid and, well, I've always liked blood. Everybody thinks I am very sick, but the thing is, blood is better than any ink or paint.
Canned reference is practically always loaded with problems. Photos, for example, contrive to kill imagination and stifle the natural development of creative patterns. While "ready-mades" do show up from time to time, they are rare. Art need not be what is seen-but what is to be seen. "Nature," said James McNeill Whistler, "is usually wrong."
With just one polka dot, nothing can be achieved. In the universe, there is the sun, the moon, the earth, and hundreds of millions of stars. All of us live in the unfathomable mystery and infinitude of the universe. Pursuing 'philosophy of the universe' through art under such circumstances has led me to what I call 'stereotypical repetition.'
I would like my art to be about the possibility that each of us has to realize our connectedness with this great Spirit, whatever you want to name it, our inherent Buddha nature, Christ consciousness, primordial reality, the ground of being, God. Whether you want to go for a personal or impersonal perception of Spirit, is up to the individual.
I'm confused about who the news belongs to. I always have it in my head that if your name's in the news, then the news should be paying you. Because it's your news and they're taking it and selling it as their product. ...If people didn't give the news their news, and if everybody kept their news to themselves, the news wouldn't have any news.