Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Literature has been a treacherous site for black Americans because literary production has been so tied with the project of proving our humanity through the act of writing.
The only way art lives is through the experience of the observer. The reality of art begins with the eyes of the beholder, through imagination, invention and confrontation.
I really am a strong believer that with editing, it should take a long time. Even you yourself are not capable of making the right decisions; sometimes you need a distance.
There is an imagined thing called black culture. But culture is a construction. It is learned behavior, not innate. The black American experience is the American experience.
I think it's more important to make a lot of different things and keep coming up with new images and things that were never made before, than to do one thing and do it well.
First I did animation films, when I was young, in time-lapse. And then in the '80s I went directly to video. The main reason for that was that I could control all the steps.
There's a whole range of sources of inspiration for the drawings and stories. They come from dreams, hallucinations, pop songs, or other things I see in the world around me.
Cezanne said, 'I love to paint people who have grown old naturally in the country.' And I say I love to paint people who have been torn to shreds by the rat race in New York.
I took a very small image and blew it up to enormous scale. What happens when you do that is that the information in the image starts to become indistinct. The image darkens.
You always feel very vulnerable when you put your work out there. You feel a kind of nakedness. And you expose something of the inner workings of the way you experience life.
We go to the movies to forget about time, to be in a dream state. And it's entertainment, distraction, from the fact that everything is kind of crumbling in front of our eyes.
My dream is to collaborate with a mature person.I feel like my talents were being wasted in art school. I would like to try something else, but not the obvious or usual thing.
One of the interesting things about quoting in an artwork is that there is a repeated confusion about who is speaking - one essentially becomes the author of a quote one uses.
All paintings start with concept, which is another word for image or imagination. The mistake is to isolate the concept as if the idea did not need to be given permanent form.
The first painting I remember selling was 'Panthera.' I made it while I was in residence at the Studio Museum in Harlem, and the museum actually purchased it directly from me.
In terms of favourite movies then, I like Lion King. Something more recent would be Alice in Wonderland; it'd be kind of cool to have The White Queen appear in Kingdom Hearts.
I think the thing is there's a work for every space, you always have to respond to a context, whether it be a physical context, or a political one, or a cultural one, whatever.
I grew up in Pennsylvania in a small town. Real small, like one high school and one movie theater. Well, there was a state college there, that was the only good thing about it.
My father was a doctor, but he was what I would call an intellectual - very well-read and very interested in knowledge. He insisted that I get as much education as my brothers.
It's a shock for me to go through and see all those years of painting my life, which is very personal for me. It's a very difficult thing for an artist to look back at his work.
In the end, it's always a single person who makes change. But I do think we should try to send artists out into the world and not have them all stick together in the big cities.
I think great art goes beyond the control of the artist. In some ways, art often makes itself and reveals things about that artist that maybe the artist is not fully conscious of.
There's a quote from Hamlet that is my guide... He tells the players not to exaggerate but to hold a mirror up to nature. Don't overdo it, don't underdo it. Do it just on the line.
I've tried never to be easily satisfied, and I've been painting like fury now for forty years.... I have a feeling. You paint about as far as your emotions go, and that's about it.
The act of creation is a kind of ritual. The origins of art and human existence lie hidden in this mystery of creation. Human creativity reaffirms and mystifies the power of 'life.
Beautiful woman wrapped in chadors, with huge machine guns in their hands. Brilliant, shocking, amazingly contradictory images. They compelled me to deeply investigate these ideas.
I search for the realness, the real feeling of a subject, all the texture around it... I always want to see the third dimension of something... I want to come alive with the object.
I surrender to the world of my imagination, reenacting all those wonderful tales my father would read aloud to me. I became a very active reader, especially history and Shakespeare.
I surrendered to a world of my imagination, reenacting all those wonderful tales my father would read aloud to me. I became a very active reader, especially history and Shakespeare.
I assumed from the outset that photography was already art, and that I and other people working in photography were artists. I understand now that this was a minority point of view.
I think our civilization is minimal enough without underlining it. Sculpture as a created object in space should enrich, not reflect, and should be beautiful. Beauty is its function.
The public needs art - and it is the responsibility of a 'self-proclaimed artist' to realize that the public needs art, and not to make bourgeois art for a few and ignore the masses.
The trouble with progress is that it tends to happen slowly and quietly. It's not necessarily going to shout about itself, or make the nightly news like a disaster or a scandal would.
These things I sample, or clip, are things that we share - music, films, sounds. It triggers a layer of participation from the audience as they recognize the material and remember it.
You have to be objective about money to use it fairly. It doesn't make you any better or any more useful than any other person. Even if you use your money to help people that doesn't.
Family photos, pictures of groups, those are truely wonderful. And they are just as good as the old masters, just as rich and just as beautifully composed (what does that mean anyway).
I feel like most of the objects coming through the ports are pretty useless. It sort of speaks to this larger point of how much we're actually taking in versus how much we really need.
I'm using the grid as formation. I wanted a relationship between the paintings and videos so that way when you are looking at the videos there's a direct relationship to the paintings.
When I started at Pratt, Spike Lee had his 40 Acres and A Mule studios down the street. You'd see Rosie Perez walking around going to Mike's Coffee Shop. So it was this black bohemian.
I've always been interested in masking, layering, dressing up and beautifying yourself and what that meant to black women. I've always wanted to make things that I haven't seen before.
Sometimes, at a certain point, the painting seems to have painted itself without my help - what I have called the 'eureka' moment when a sudden daring intervention has worked a miracle.
I think my books are better than my exhibitions. If people don't like my books then I don't mind. I guess you like them enough to write an essay about them so that makes me pretty happy.
I've always felt more comfortable in fantasy. Fantasy has felt more real to me at times. Drawing was an immediate outlet for that: to create. It's been my ability to create my own world.
When it is working, you completely go into another place, you're tapping into things that are totally universal, completely beyond your ego and your own self. That's what it's all about.
I've always been excited by rotoscoping, the technique used in films like 'Waking Life,' which fuses animation with real-life emotion. It seemed like it was a process ripe for innovation.
The camera is an eye that sees and records the lives of filthy people. Its pictures are hung in museums and published in thick books that future generations can see how horrible life was.
Red is one of the strongest colors, it's blood, it has a power with the eye. That's why traffic lights are red I guess, and stop signs as well... In fact I use red in all of my paintings.
I wanted to paint pictures of people. I thought, "Why bother doing anything else. Everything else is a waste of time. I want to tell stories about people and their feelings and emotions."
That is an annoying side of democracy. The pendulum falls often in the extreme, and then we have to bring it back. It's never stable; it's a permanent discussion about finding a way back.
Willem de Kooning paintings are a language to be learned. When they were first shown, they were ridiculed as being just drips and splatters and splashes. You had to learn how to read them.