I realize that protest paintings are not exactly in vogue, but I’ve done many.
I often use hypothetical situations to generate information and imagery for paintings and to create a fictional space where a subject can be put into play.
Kinkade’s paintings are worthless schmaltz, and the lamestream media that love him are wrong. However, I’d love to see a museum mount a small show of Kinkade’s work. I would like the art world and the wider world to argue about him in public, out in the open.
Imagine if all those kings and dukes hadn’t commissioned those crazy cathedrals, paintings and music… we’d still be living in sticks and mud. Because none of those things made any economic sense. Human beings’ capacity to ‘waste time’ is a miracle – but that’s exactly what art is for.
My paintings do not have a center, but depend on the same amount of interest throughout.
The paintings to me are always canvas; sculpture has always been metal, though I have made sculpture in wood, also.
All my life, my girlfriends are always skinny. Beauty in art has nothing to do with beauty in reality. Why do you like primitive art? Because there is beauty in the deformity. Sometimes paintings that people consider realistic are not at all. Raphael figures look realistic, but in real life, they were deformed.
The thrill of a photo-realist painter is if you get really close to the painting, it looks just like a photograph. Whereas in my case, if you get close to my paintings, they totally fall apart – so I’m about as far from a photo-realist as it gets.
I’m not the kind of artist who has an idea and then carries it out; it’s more like I find what the idea was through doing the paintings.
There’s been too much attention on marketing. Can’t we just talk about the paintings?
Now almost every artist outside of New York is connected with some school or some museum school, and even in New York the majority are. That’s an interesting fact when you take the idea of making money, making a living selling paintings. Only a dozen or two painters do that.
There have been many, many paintings of Theseus and the Minotaur, as it is one of the more popular myths, so how could I make mine different and new? I decided it would be best to make the most dynamic painting I could. I wanted to capture the moment right before the Minotaur’s horn was snapped.
The art of mastering life is the prerequisite for all further forms of expression, whether they are paintings, sculptures, tragedies, or musical compositions.
If you study my paintings, there are no signs of human life.
Sol LeWitt had a huge influence on my work because of his use of repetition and his clarity, setting up a system and letting that system go. That’s kind of where the text paintings came from.
There is so much strife and tension in the world that I find the silent world of paintings from the past both hopeful and healing.
Really, I do not know whether my paintings are surrealist or not, but I do know that they are the frankest expression of myself.
The Taliban’s acts of cultural vandalism – the most infamous being the destruction of the giant Bamiyan Buddhas – had a devastating effect on Afghan culture and the artistic scene. The Taliban burned countless films, VCRs, music tapes, books, and paintings. They jailed filmmakers, musicians, painters, and sculptors.
I have some beautiful 20th-century drawings and a few paintings, but I’m not a collector, and I’m not particularly attached to objects.
I like the transience of Klimt paintings.
In my 20s, as I began to travel in Europe, I found comfort in religious paintings. Even though my own belief in Catholic dogma had been shaken and weakened, I found that the beauty and the richness of the art still held me.
I swear if I had to do this over again, I would just do the paintings and never show them.
I started doing sculpture in 1959. I had no commissions then. They were painted, similar in style to the paintings… At a certain point, I decided I didn’t want an edge between two colors, I wanted color differences in literal space.
I was in Madrid as a young girl and a teenager. I’ll never forget when I went to the Prado Museum for the first time and saw the paintings of Goya. They had such a big impact on me.
A museum should not just be a place for fancy paintings but should be a place where we can communicate our lives through our everyday objects.
For me, art is always a kind of theater. When I started the spot paintings, I made them as an endless series. But I was never serious about it being an endless series. It was just an implied endless series. The theater means you just have to make it look good for that moment in the spotlight.
None of my paintings I would say are religious.
I take this art very seriously and passionately. I love what I do. You can’t help but grow. That’s not to say you don’t make mistakes or make bad choices, but that’s part of the art. Painters paint bad paintings.
What I love doing is creating a room, with attractive paintings and colours and furnishings – very much my mother.
It’s a shame when other people’s gambling habits change the meaning of paintings or when fluctuations of value start to dictate how people perceive art because it’s too expensive to be interesting or moving. That’s when I get bummed out.
Far from being dominated by ideas from Paris and New York, Latin American artists were often the innovators. They were doing drip paintings in advance of Pollock, creating language art before the American conceptualists, and fashioning shaped canvases decades before Kelly or Stella.
All the Indigenous paintings throughout history, they were always a bird’s eye view, it’s the Indigenous way of storytelling.
You get a painting idea, and you go do that. You get a cinema idea, and you go in to do that. The difference is, even though the paintings might take some time to make, with cinema you are booked for a year and a half, minimum.
I like something about George W. Bush. A lot. After spending more than a decade having almost physiological-chemical reactions anytime I saw him, getting the heebie-jeebies whenever he spoke – after being sure from the start that he was a Gremlin on the wing of America – I really like the paintings of George W. Bush.
Whether in cave paintings or the latest uses of the Internet, human beings have always told their histories and truths through parable and fable. We are inveterate storytellers.
I feel like there’s too many paintings left unpainted that I just don’t want to take the time away.
My paintings are not about what is seen. They are about what is known forever in the mind.
I gave up on the idea of making art a long time ago, because I wanted to know how to make paintings; but once I came to know that, reconsidering the question of what art is returned as a critical issue.
I experience a period of frightening clarity in those moments when nature is so beautiful. I am no longer sure of myself, and the paintings appear as in a dream.
The painter must enclose himself within his work; he must respond not with words, but with paintings.
I started out as an artist, and what I do is verbal paintings. I paint a picture. Hopefully, you’ll see the characters and what they’re doing and what they’re saying.
I feel blessed every day when I’m working on these paintings… the first artist to ever go to another world and try to tell stories that people care about.
Sometimes people only see horrible, terrible things in my paintings.
Do cave paintings mean anything? Not really, but I, for one, am happy to have them.
Poor Georgia O’Keeffe. Death didn’t soften the opinions of the art world toward her paintings.
All pictures are unnatural. All pictures are sad because they’re about dead people. Paintings you don’t think of in a special time or with a specific event. With photos I always think I’m looking at something dead.
I love beautiful things. I’m not into art so much, like paintings.
When I’m traveling the world, I don’t ever look anymore at the geography – just enough to catch galleries and paintings.
All my paintings are usually done in drawing form, very small. I make notations in drawings first, and then I make a collage for color. But drawing is always my notation.
It’s productive and fun to try interpreting cave paintings, but ultimately, they can’t teach us anything beyond what we imagine them to be.
I gravitate toward contemporary art. I love great paintings, sculpture, photography, some video art.
Paintings are like a beer, only beer tastes good and it’s hard to stop drinking beer.
Painters of paintings, writers of books, never could tell the half.
I do real paintings, you know. I’m a little messy in the studio, so I’m a bit of a danger. But I just adore it.
I have a vision of artists putting into film, drama, literature, music, and paintings great themes and great characters from the Book of Mormon.
My dad is a sculptor and a painter, and mum runs an art gallery, which sells beautiful jewelry and ceramics and paintings – local and international.
Painting is almost like a sport. It’s like this action thing. When I do it, I’m really not thinking. The paintings are like a diary that I might not want to read again.
Clare Henderson creates the most beautiful delicate prints and paintings.
