I think a lot of times we think of music as being different from other art forms. You would never ask a sculptor or painter, 'Go paint this because you'll get paid more,' you know what I mean?

I arrived in the U.S. for graduate study in literature in the fall of 1986. I was twenty-three. After a year, I began to paint, even though I had come to the U.S. intending to become a writer.

As I paint, I realise, while it's something I do very much by myself, it's very solitary, the creative process feels similar to making music to me now, at least as far as my brain is concerned.

I constantly modify myself. There are downfalls to that because you are constantly trying to figure out who you are, but at the same time, I'm blessed with the lack of base paint on the canvas.

Wanting to be understood by an audience that didn't know Russian, I tried to paint musical pictures by emphasizing the phrasing, using voice color more boldly, and varying the shade and nuance.

Certainly a chair can be just as interesting as a human being. But first the chair must be perceived by a human being... You should not paint the chair, but only what someone has felt about it.

You know, painting has given me a lot of freedom, because for some reason, I've been able to paint things, organize things in a way that I see that don't have any buffers or compromises in them.

A way you can get really good abs in film is you get your makeup artist to paint shadows - faux washboard. But if you see me in a movie and I have great abs, it means I have a great body double.

If I inherited a billion dollars and didn't have to work ever again, what would I do to fill my day? I'd paint, I'd write jokes and stories, and I'd hang out and chat to very interesting people.

I have to accept my role. I will never kill myself like Vincent Van Gogh. Nor will I paint beautiful water lilies like Monet. I can't do that. I'm in the idiot role of being a kiddie book person.

I know now that most people are so closely concerned with themselves that they are not aware of their own individuality, I can see myself, and it has helped me to say what I want to say in paint.

Shadows sometimes people don't see shadows. The Chinese of course never paint them in pictures, oriental art never deals with shadow. But I noticed these shadows and I knew it meant it was sunny.

I think it would be more beneficial to protection of species if we could focus our efforts rather than paint a broad-brush area that is so enormous that active management is very, very difficult.

I call myself a grasshopper. I paint, I write poetry, and I'm in a band. When it comes to movies and TV, I like to work in everything and with everyone. I wanna do it all, beyond even the screen.

A record ... is a statement, it's its own statement, its own entity, rather than being about something else. If I was a painter ... I don't paint the chair, I would paint feelings about the chair.

Elected officials want to paint everyone with a broad brush. What they don't get is that everyone pays bills. Liberal activists pay bills. Conservative activists pay bills. Independents pay bills.

I'd love to jump in a spaceship and shoot myself to the moon, where I'll paint the word 'Love.' So when people step outside before they go to bed and look up to see it, they'll just dream of love.

I love color. When I paint, I use a lot of color. I love art that has a vibrancy of color and compositions. I adore the Impressionists, and I'm influenced strongly by them as a self-taught artist.

Nudes are the greatest to paint. Everything you can find in a landscape or a still life or anything else is there: darkness and light, character dimension, texture. I painted heads too, of course.

Before this I tended to paint figures and put them in an environment. Now I paint an environment to put figures in. It's a subtle difference, but it is a difference. It's something I did naturally.

I found that if I don't paint for around a week, I get practically suicidal. It took a long time to figure out why I had these mood swings, and I finally figured out it's because I haven't painted.

That's what I paint, I paint people. They're portraits, but you won't always be pleased with the way you look in my paintings. Which is fine, I guess. Unless you're buying it, and it's of your kid!

You can sometimes avoid costly mistakes. Paint a corner of the room a certain color to see how the light affects it. Or buy just one yard of an expensive fabric to see how you like it in your room.

Artists need some kind of stimulating experience a lot of times, which crystallizes when you sing about it or paint it or sculpt it. You literally mold the experience the way you want. It's therapy.

All art is exorcism. I paint dreams and visions too; the dreams and visions of my time. Painting is the effort to produce order; order in yourself. There is much chaos in me, much chaos in our time.

Perfect isn't normal, nor is it interesting. I have no features without makeup. I am pale. I have blond lashes. You could just paint my face - it's like a blank canvas. It can be great for what I do.

When I work alone, it can be like dabbling with a canvas. Maybe you paint over bits, and it starts to form its own life and lead you off in a direction. It becomes an intuitive, subconscious process.

I hang out with the right people, my friends that I've had since the beginning. We go to the beach, take walks, paint, see our family - just normal things that people who become famous lose sight of.

I paint stupid things; that's what I do. I can't think of anything more boring than a really beautiful thing. You have to mess it up. There has to be something a little kinky to keep their attention.

I think it's important I stay connected to every part of my personality. I play basketball. I rock climb. I paint. I'm a little bit scattered, but it's so I can convincingly play all these characters.

Media is a double-edged sword and has the power to change hearts and minds through authentic storytelling as well as the power to paint a person, or an entire community, in a dim and misleading light.

If you do things, whether it's acting or music or painting, do it without fear - that's my philosophy. Because nobody can arrest you and put you in jail if you paint badly, so there's nothing to lose.

It's true that I have a wide range of interests. I like to write and paint and make music and go walking on my own and garden. In fact, gardening is probably what I enjoy doing more than anything else.

I love to draw and paint. I did all the illustrations in my books, so I always have my watercolours with me. I was creative as a child and studied art at Central Saint Martins before getting into food.

Be Bold. It's just canvas, just paint. If it doesn't work for you, paint over it and start again. Don't be afraid that you are wasting supplies. Every failure teaches something, if only what not to do.

Some people would say my paintings show a future world and maybe they do, but I paint from reality. I put several things and ideas together, and perhaps, when I have finished, it could show the future.

A kind of racism still exists in the United States, and Islamophobia is a more convenient way to express that sentiment. There has also been an attempt to paint Muslims as enemies of the United States.

I paint very messy. I throw paint around. So when I let myself do the same sort of thing with my writing, and I would just write and write and write and revise, that's when I found my rhythm in writing.

All pictures that's painted with sense and with thought / Are painted by madmen as sure as a groat; / For the greater the fool in the pencil more blest, / And when they are drunk they always paint best.

Sure, the Internet is the future, but what we do on the Internet is still very primal. It's all about connecting to other people, sharing emotion. It's our new feathers or face paint. It's all very raw.

I used to paint pictures - what happened was, I used to draw and paint pictures. And some of my friends would be, like, 'Yo, you should put that on a T-shirt,' because that's where their brain would go.

My boyfriend has always been a collector of art. He once rang up Paul Kenton and asked him to paint a New York skyline for me. He did, and it is the first painting that has ever been painted just for me.

An obsessive attention to the news, I've realized, only serves to paint a picture of the world as a throbbing blob of dysfunction, most news falling somewhere on a scale from disappointing to calamitous.

It is impossible to know what fate will bring. If you love to write or paint, you will keep on writing or painting, and things will either work out or not, and you just have to keep being in the process.

Writing is a form of therapy; sometimes I wonder how all those who do not write, compose or paint can manage to escape the madness, melancholia, the panic and fear which is inherent in a human situation.

My sister-in-law is a painter, and I'll say, how long did it take you to paint that painting. She'll say, It took me maybe three days, but it took me all my life to get the skills to paint that painting.

Usually, I am a compulsive person, and I need - sometimes urgently - to paint... Painting is close to poetry, is a kind of poetry expressed visually. It has to be spontaneous, rapid - at least in my case.

During the Eighties, when I was hurting for money, I thought, "Hang on a minute - I can paint." I was living in New York and I thought it would get the grocery money coming in, and it escalated from there.

During the Eighties, when I was hurting for money, I thought, 'Hang on a minute - I can paint.' I was living in New York and I thought it would get the grocery money coming in, and it escalated from there.

The big shock of my life was Abstract Expressionism - Pollock, de Kooning, those guys. It changed my work. I was an academically trained student, and suddenly you could pour paint, smear it on, broom it on!

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