Through her paintings, she breaks all the taboos of the woman’s body and of female sexuality.
There was a point I could have just churned out the spot and spin paintings for ever and laughed all the way to the bank.
When I was about seven, one or two people encouraged me, and art became an enormous and important refuge. By adolescence, I was absolutely passionate about it and felt those paintings and those painters, whether they lived a few hundred years ago or were still alive, were somehow my companions.
I look at my paintings for a very long time before letting them out of my studio. I like to get on the treadmill and look around at all of my paintings while I exercise. I try to stare them down to make them reveal their weaknesses. If they reveal weaknesses, they get repainted.
I try to combine in my paintings cinematic feeling, emotional feeling, and sometimes actually writing on the page to combine all the different elements of communication.
The U.S. museums weren’t looking at my paintings at all – they hated them, irredeemably. People metaphorically threw up when they saw my work! They thought I was enlarging comics, or just copying them.
I also take pleasure in the so-called negative power in Grotjahn’s work. That is, I love his paintings for what they are not. Unlike much art of the past decade, Grotjahn isn’t simply working from a prescribed checklist of academically acceptable, curator-approved ‘isms’ and twists.
Most early Icelandic paintings are landscapes.
How are we going to make painters by lecturing to them? We are going to make questioners, doubters, and talkers. We are going to make painters by painting ourselves, and by showing the paintings of others. By working frankly from our convictions, we are going to make them work frankly from theirs.
Restorers of paintings and pottery follow a code of conduct in their work to distinguish the original material from what they are adding later.
My paintings are rubbish.
Nobody complains that Bernini’s sculptures are too darn real, right? Or that Norman Rockwell’s paintings are too creepy. Well, robots can seem real and be loved, too. We’re trying to make a new art medium out of robotics.
Shape and color are my two strong things. And by doing this, drawing plants has always led me into my paintings and my sculptures.
‘The Bradshaws’ is the appropriately inappropriate English title given to an enigma – some hundreds of thousands of mysterious rock art paintings scattered through the wilds of the Kimberley, an area larger than Germany in the remote, scarcely populated northwest of Australia.
I always bought pictures, I only started to buy oil paintings when I started to make serious amounts of money because they cost a serious amount of money.
I’m a great looker at pictures and paintings, and so forth. That’s what I look for – a kind of formal beauty. I want that in my photography. It isn’t always what we conventionally think of as beauty.
In October 1959, I could scarcely wait to get off the plane that had brought me to New Delhi so that I could go to the Indian Arts Palace in Connaught Place and begin buying miniature paintings.
I was making big paintings with mythological themes. When I started painting black figures, the white professors were relieved, and the black students were like, ‘She’s on our side.’ These are the kinds of issues that a white male artist just doesn’t have to deal with.
It’s great that New York has large spaces for art. But the enormous immaculate box has become a dated, even oppressive place. Many of these spaces were designed for sprawling installations, large paintings, and the Relational Aesthetics work of the past fifteen years.
Wherever you look there are inspirations, books, literature, paintings, landscapes, everything. Just living is an inspiration.
In anything there has to be dark and light. There’s a lot of joy in my paintings and a lot of darkness.
My paintings are very much about the consumption and production of blackness. And how blackness is marketed to the world.
Paintings have a life of their own that derives from the painter’s soul.
Ironically, my paintings don’t photograph well.
I’ve been playing piano my whole life, but I’d never tried to understand how compositions are made, really. Try to imagine if you’d loved paintings your whole life but had never painted one. My aspiration now is just to understand.
The old, sad art colors are gone. Now I paint bright colors. I paint paintings which are happy, where children are laughing and playing with animals. I paint paradise on Earth. I still paint sadness sometimes, but there is sadness in the world, too.
The paintings by Van Gough and Chagall had a big influence on me.
I thought art was dead rabbits hanging by their feet on a wall. I went to Italy and saw all the religious paintings, and they didn’t move me all that much. Then someone invited me to see this van Gogh exhibit at the Rosenberg Gallery in San Francisco.
There’s plenty of stuff that I don’t feel dissident about: I really like tea, I don’t have any problem with that. I like lots of paintings.
In aristocratic societies, rich people used to commission exquisite paintings for their walls.
My paintings capture the humor, zaniness, and depth of the Batman villains as well as the Freudian motivations of Batman as an all-too-human, venerable, and funny vigilante superhero.
The real change that paintings undergo is in the perceptions of the viewer.
I prefer to leave the paintings to speak for themselves.
Poetry offers works of art that are beautiful, like paintings, which are my second favorite work of the art, but there are also works of art that embody emotion and that are kind of school for feeling. They teach how to feel, and they do this by the means of their beauty of language.
When the modern movement began, starting perhaps with the paintings of Manet and the poetry of Baudelaire and Rimbaud, what distinguished the modern movement was the enormous honesty that writers, painters and playwrights displayed about themselves. The bourgeois novel flinches from such notions.
The history of American art, in a way, begins with Jackson Pollock and his big paintings. This theme of bigness – all painters and sculptors have dealt with it ever since.
The narrative oftentimes is that everything that comes out of the hood is ‘real,’ and so I thought, ‘I’ll base it on the absurd, the not real. I’ll twist the idea of real on its head and see if I can get away with it. I’ll make paintings that come not from a place but through an abstract gaze.’
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.
I don’t very much enjoy looking at paintings in general. I know too much about them. I take them apart.
Giorgio Morandi’s paintings make me think that artists may not totally choose, or even control, their subjects or style.
I believe that 100, 200, 300 years from now, all these paintings will be around because they’re the first paintings of humans doing things off this Earth.
To be alive, to be able to see, to walk, to have houses, music, paintings – it’s all a miracle. I have adopted the technique of living life miracle to miracle.
My interest in art must have started with my Catholic upbringing. Art was everywhere: churches with its paintings, sculptures, stained glass, textiles, and fine metalwork.
Whenever I’m in Edinburgh, which I visit often, I always try to hop on a train to Kirkcaldy to visit the art gallery, where my grandfather was convenor for 36 years, to revisit the marvellous paintings from my childhood – as do other family members.
I’ve dreamed landscapes for years, and my dreams play an enormous role in my work. In fact, when I first started doing landscapes I felt insecure about painting in this style, and the dreams were like positive omens for me, and I’ve done a few paintings that were exact replicas of images that came to me in dreams.
Makeup ignites a psychological transformation of both the wearer and the observer. My paintings sought to locate the subject of art within the manipulation of that altered predisposition.
I’ve always tried to be very seductive. I want the paintings to draw you in. But I don’t want to just glamour you. I want to make an image of the time we live in and reflect it back.
Traditional paintings have few figures in them and value negative space. Japanese calligraphy and brush paintings are in black and white. Haiku is the shortest poem form in the world. These are a few examples of a minimalistic aesthetic in Japanese art and culture.
I’ve had encounters with animals that have been really mystical. I’ve always been really into animals. But the way they appear in the paintings, they come from my mind’s eye more than: ‘I’m gonna draw a dog now.’ It isn’t thought out: ‘Now I’m gonna draw a bird.’ They just appear.
The earliest paintings I loved were always the most non-referential paintings you can imagine, by painters such as Mondrian. I was thrilled by them because they didn’t refer to anything else. They stood alone, and they were just charged magic objects that did not get their strength from being connected to anything else.
I also paint and enjoy acrylic medium; some of my close friends have paintings I did for them.
