It's all about commerce. Movies are not made like paintings, where you can make them for free and put them at the side. Movies are supposed to make money.

Painting is something that you need to do, if not every day, then certainly most days. It is almost like being a pianist: if you stop, you lose something.

Mostly people are ignorant, what is the language of painting. You know, they're ignorant. It is so difficult to make them aware, but time will teach them.

I started with straight, basic, symbolic structures. My problem now is the opposite; as I get older, I try to make my paintings more contrapuntal, richer.

Painting is the same kind of problem as unfolding a long, sustained interlocked argument... It is a proposition commanded by a single unity of conception.

It's weird making a drawing of painting. I start to realize that charcoal is this incredibly fragile material. I'm making images of paintings out of dust.

Used to be, conservatives revered the Average American, that Norman Rockwell oil painting of diner food, humble faith, honest toil, and Capraesque virtue.

The small figures that appear in my paintings are there only because they were there when I was working from nature on my preliminary sketches with pencil.

Relevance, for me, is about being creative and doing things that you believe in, whether that's music or acting or painting a picture, or whatever that is.

From a child, I had an inordinate desire for knowledge and especially music, painting, flowers, and the sciences, Algebra being one of my favorite studies.

(Landscapes) are too close to painting. And TV has nothing to do with painting. It's just transmission. And you can't transmit a landscape, happily enough.

Life is a painting, and you are the artist. You have on your palette all the colors in the spectrum - the same ones available to Michaelangelo and DaVinci.

Painting what I experience, translating what I feel, is like a great liberation. But it is also work, self-examination, consciousness, criticism, struggle.

I hope that my painting has the impact of giving someone, as it did me, the feeling of his own totality, of his own separateness, of his own individuality.

Polyphonic painting is superior to music in that there, the time element becomes a spatial element. The notion of simultaneity stands out even more richly.

The Academies of Art are nothing but great painting factories - those with talent are fed in at one end, and they come out as mechanical painting machines.

Nowhere in my collection do I, say, have a Auguste Renoir painting. Because everybody knows that this is a good painter without me having to demonstrate it.

Painting is a very difficult thing. It absorbs the whole man, body and soul, thus have I passed blindly many things which belong to real and political life.

I destroy the painting as soon as I can see what it is. When I can make out something in it, I destroy it because it's no longer coming from my unconscious.

Years ago, when I was in Siena for the first time, I saw the works of Duccio, whose deeply emotional painting from the thirteenth century has never left me.

Does any art have a practical value? People love to talk about how expensive a painting is. That's the only way we can talk about paintings in this century.

The pictures I contemplate painting would constitute a halfway state and attempt to point out the direction of the future - without arriving there completely

I have friends come over and we read plays out loud and I make paintings and I just do things all the time just so I don't ever feel like I'm sitting around.

If one were to ask a painter what he felt about anything, his just response - though he seldom makes it - would be to paint it, and in painting, to find out.

I trust the symbol that is arrived at in the making of the painting. Meaningful symbols aren't invented as such, they are made or discovered as symbol later.

I think about women and their thoughts and ideas, and I suppose when I'm painting them I'm getting to be them, in a sense. That is why I plainly paint women.

I had stopped painting around 2000, which I guess was when the music thing started getting pretty busy. I just didn't have enough time to pursue it properly.

I find painting a much slower process than comedy, where you can go a mile a minute verbally and hope to God that some of the people out there understand you.

I'm not at all interested in painting the object just as it is in nature. Certainly I'm much more interested in the mood of a thing than the truth of a thing.

I'm the expert when it comes to my paintings. I think all great painters have to have that confidence in what they are seeking and when they're getting there.

When something is finished, that means it's dead, doesn't it? I believe in everlastingness. I never finish a painting - I just stop working on it for a while.

When I was young, I didn't want to do traditional painting and calligraphy. I deliberately wanted to separate from my father so I could feel I existed myself.

For many years it was difficult for me to paint because I didn't feel the informal painting that was then tyrannically dominating painters and art collectors.

I felt I really wanted to back off from music completely and just work within the visual arts in some way. I started painting quite passionately at that time.

One of the problems with technology is that no photograph, as superb and outstanding as it may be, will ever be as satisfying as the most middle-rate painting.

Everything has a reason, including the selection of the photos, which was not arbitrary but appropriate to the period, its highs and lows and my sense of them.

Once you start painting, you could of course get lost. I mean you get out of yourself, you don't know whether you're thinking, you just act actually sometimes.

To me, photography is like a quest, or a pilgrimage, or a hunt. I love painting, I love music, but photography is what has allowed me to get outside of myself.

Rembrandt was way ahead of his time. It's as if he was painting an amateur theatrical, or a professional theatrical, in his studio. It's a kind of performance.

I decided to become a painter when my first four paintings where all published and attracted a great deal of interest. I exhibited one of them and it was sold.

I keep plastering it until it comes around to what I want, in terms of all I know and think about painting now, as well as in terms of the initial observation.

Painting is sometimes like those recipes where you do all manner of elaborate things to a duck, and then end up putting it on one side and only using the skin.

Painting pictures is simply the official, the daily work, the profession, and in the case of the watercolours I can sooner afford to follow my mood, my spirits.

Painting something that defies the law of the land is good. Painting something that defies the law of the land and the law of gravity at the same time is ideal.

It was the only thing I had to do. I worked to get rid of the time, even now I work for something to do. Painting is a wonderful way of getting rid of the days.

No one but myself knows the anxiety I go through and the trouble I give myself to finish paintings which do not satisfy me and seem to please so very few others.

I was painting sets, working in editorial as an assistant, driving their trucks, lying that I knew how to drive a truck, and doing commercials and documentaries.

Visible things can be invisible. However, our powers of thought grasp both the visible and the invisible – and I make use of painting to render thoughts visible.

Speaking of nudes, I have always had a great fondness for this subject, both in my paintings and in my photos, and I must admit, not for purely artistic reasons.

When Michelangelo finished the painting of the Sistine Chapel's ceiling, he spent the rest of his life trying to remove the paint that had poured into his sleeve.

Share This Page