My paintings are certainly nonobjective. They’re just horizontal lines.
The artistic process in digital art is very much the same as for making other kinds of paintings.
My paintings always feature trails that dissolve into mysterious areas, patches of light that lead the eye around corners, pathways, open gates, etc.
Paintings, people really don’t understand… They don’t really get paintings. Quilts they do understand because everybody has a quilt in their house.
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.
It is easy to have a lot of paintings or projects hanging around that are ‘almost done.’
I paint mostly from real life. It has to start with that. Real people, real street scenes, behind the curtain scenes, live models, paintings, photographs, staged setups, architecture, grids, graphic design. Whatever it takes to make it work.
Many, many of my paintings have come from the first chapter of Moby Dick.
I always feel the desire to look for the extraordinary in ordinary things; to suggest, not to impose, to leave always a slight touch of mystery in my paintings.
The only thing I can say is consistent in all my paintings is vivid color.
It is not your paintings I like, it is your painting.
I went to the Louvre in Paris, and I saw all the paintings and the Mona Lisa. You don’t really see something like that every day. I was looking at it, and everything else in the room just shut out. Like, Leonardo Da Vinci painted this thing – this is unreal that he touched that. It had this crazy effect on me.
One of my favorite paintings I’ve done happened after I broke up with a boyfriend.
I think it’s absurd to believe that movies should look like paintings and say something like serious books say something.
I have a fondness for making paintings that go beyond just having a conversation about art for art’s sake or having a conversation about art history. I actually really enjoy looking at broader popular culture.
As far as modern writing is concerned, it is rarely rewarding to translate it, although it might be easy. Translation is very much like copying paintings.
I counterfeited Mark Kostabi’s artworks. During the eighties, Mark didn’t paint his own paintings. Instead, he had other artists painting them, and he just added his signature. So what I did was to use some of the same painters, and signed his name myself.
Pictures of Amazons on vase paintings always show them as beautiful, active, spirited, courageous, and brave.
Multicolored stones and paintings, walkways, and theaters are useless in a city unless it also contains wisdom and law. Such things are the subject of wisdom and law, not equivalent to them.
When I started to do these Pop paintings seriously, I used all these other paintings – the abstract ones – as mats. I was painting in the bedroom, and I put them on the floor so I wouldn’t get paint on the floor. They got destroyed.
I’ve always worked from images that already exist in our culture, and I just tweak them – I photograph my vision/interpretation of things that already exist, and I take it to the extreme. And then I make paintings or videos.
I had bohemian parents in Seattle in the last ’60s living in a houseboat. My dad wrote science fiction novels and painted big murals and oil paintings.
The illustrations in picture books are the first paintings most children see, and because of that, they are incredibly important. What we see and share at that age stays with us for life.
I believe in originality, primarily. However, it’s important to know what there has been before to aim in that direction. Art history informs us. It informs our mind. I like to look at books, exhibitions, paintings, as a computer, subconsciously taking on information.
I’m sure I’ve been influenced by every fine writer I’ve ever read, from Dickens and Austen to Auden and Jane Hirshfield. And also, the short stories of Updike, Cheever, Munro, Alice Adams, and Doris Lessing. And the plays of Oscar Wilde. And paintings by Alice Neel and Matisse.
‘Shan shui’ you can literally translate as ‘mountain and water.’ In traditional Chinese culture, there are a lot of paintings about shan shui, but now we’re talking about a shan-shui city.
There’s something in music that fascinates me – how it communicates emotion so immediately. That’s something I wanted in my paintings.
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!
Since the tubes of paint used by the artist are manufactured and ready-made products, we must conclude that all the paintings in the world are ‘ready-mades aided’ and also works of assemblage.
I have been surrounded by artists and paintings throughout my life. My father Ted Dyer is an artist, and from a very early age I have spent time painting and drawing.
I have two paintings that used to belong to my grandmother, who lived in Chicago. When I was young, I used to sleep over at her house. They came to me when she passed away. I remember looking at them when I was a girl, and now, every time I see them, I feel good.
All the fingerprint paintings are done without a grid.
You have to have patience and confidence that your things will let you know where they need to go. Particularly artwork. Paintings will tell you where they want to be.
I don’t look at the work of my contemporaries very much; I tend to look at pictures by dead artists. It’s much easier to get near their paintings.
At its best, what art does is, it points to who we as human beings and what we as human beings value. And if Black Lives Matter, they deserve to be in paintings.
I think that the mythology of Van Gogh’s life, and the beauty of his paintings, is unstoppable.
To be an artist is not a matter of making paintings or objects at all. What we are really dealing with is our state of consciousness and the shape of our perceptions.
With Millais’s paintings, it’s microscopic; when he does hair, it’s extraordinary: you can see every strand.
I’ll bet there are a lot of artists that nobody hears about who just make more money than anybody. The people that do all the sculptures and paintings for big building construction. We never hear about them, but they make more money than anybody.
I grew up with the idea of the cyborg and the robot, but at the same time I felt this intense disconnection between the things I was engaged with and inspired by in terms of fun and play. It seemed like paintings and drawings were so static.
I like the idea that paintings are not representations of an artist’s psyche. Making the paintings is what gives the artist her psyche in the first place.
Who’s going to ask a painter to see a diploma? They’d say, ‘Can I see your paintings?’, wouldn’t they?
In every respect, fantasy is like doing abstract paintings.
My work, in a certain way, got started in 1996 when I did an exhibition of thirteen paintings that were solely based on fashion imagery.
The way I paint is similar to rock in that you don’t stand around and say, ‘Gee, what are they talking about?’ Rock is simple, blunt, colorful. Same with my paintings. You don’t stand back and wonder what it is. That’s Jim Morrison, that’s a panda, that’s a scene on the West Coast. It’s not abstract.
If you look at the paintings that I love in art history, these are the paintings where great, powerful men are being celebrated on the big walls of museums throughout the world. What feels really strange is not to be able to see a reflection of myself in that world.
The miniatures of the Mughal period are really the pinnacle of Indian artistic achievement. And not a single one of those paintings is done by an individual artist.
You go to Florence and all the paintings you’ve seen in books are there. To see them in real life, it just blows your mind.
The mirror is a powerful tool because it forces you to deal with yourself on a deeper level. Conceptually, paintings are like mirrors. They’re an expression from the artist: ‘This is how I view the world – I’m presenting it to you.’
One can easily tell that the creator of the paintings in the Sistine Chapel was above all a sculptor.
I have realised how exciting and easy it is to be a time traveller by looking at paintings and films and architecture and playing music or listening to it. I don’t think you necessarily have to live in the present all the time.
I’ve got a nice collection of paintings – a Basquiat, a black-and-white Warhol that’s like a Rorschach test, and I commissioned Takashi Murakami to do a ten-foot joint for me. It’s almost like the explosion in Hiroshima with his famous skeleton head. There’s a wall above my fireplace reserved for it.
What inspires me to paint is life, my emotions, through my paintings I want people to understand that life isn’t always happy but you should be always hopeful that’s why I use bright colors in my paintings, that’s what I want people to feel about me and when they see my art.
Picasso’s always been such a huge influence that I thought when I started the cartoon paintings that I was getting away from Picasso, and even my cartoons of Picasso were done almost to rid myself of his influence.
