The reason I do this job is because I started to be a painter. Making money in art was difficult. The easiest way to make money was to use art for some other reason. One of the easiest and most interesting from an economic point of view was fashion. Fashion pays.
No one purposefully paints a bad painting. It’s someone who’s trying to do a good painting, but it’s terrible. I have one with a matador, and the bull is going through the blanket. You can tell the painter didn’t know how to paint it.
Sally Field taught me to do needlepoint on ‘Steel Magnolias,’ and a standby painter on ‘Pelican Brief’ taught me to knit. I’m pretty good at it now!
Art was a way of life in my family. My grandfather, N.C. Wyeth, who died a year before I was born, had been a prominent painter. So was my father, Andrew. My two aunts and two of my uncles also earned a living as painters.
An icon painter starts not with Jesus Christ but by finding earth and rubbing. Now what is earth, what are you rubbing in directing?
When I left school, I wanted to be an artist, specifically a painter.
When I act, I feel like I am a color in someone else’s painting – I can be the best blue that there is, but I’m still only part of their entire picture – but, with music, when I am performing with Reserved For Rondee, I am the painter, you know?
I realized early on that if I became an actor, I could play a writer and a sculptor and a painter and be all the things you just don’t have time to be in your lifetime. I could get to learn about all of them.
I have wanted to be a fine artist painter, and I reached the point in art schools were I’d like to understand more about images and how images communicate information to people. And I was not getting very far in that from my professors.
I was always pretty decent at fast stick work or doing stuff that seems impressive that’s not really; I was pretty tasteful and had good ideas musically. But I had a terrible sense of tempo, which is like being a blind painter.
If I had parallel lives to pursue, I would also want one as a painter.
I started out with three creative jobs – painter, janitor and gag writer.
I’m not a film-school guy. I was a high-school dropout. I was on a nuclear submarine. I was an electrician. I was a house painter.
If I was a stone mason or if I was a painter or building bridges or whatever, there’s going to be some wear and tear on your body and your brain. And that’s just the way it is.
I was really serious about painting, so I could never be a Sunday painter. You can’t just switch it on and off.
If I hadn’t been a designer, I’d have been a painter. I began as a painter and learned the craft of pottery in order to support myself.
I grew up in such a musical family, and my dad was the first chair in the Johannesburg Symphony Orchestra, and my mom was a piano teacher and a painter, so it was kind of a creative environment, and it was kind of in my DNA.
My personality is more the personality of a painter.
I’m not a very good painter, but I’m learning a lot.
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.
A poet can feel free, in my estimation, to write a poem for himself. Or a painter can paint a painting for himself. You can write a short story for yourself. But for me, comedy by its nature is communal. If other people don’t get it, I’m not sure why you are doing it.
To say to the painter that Nature is to be taken as she is, is to say to the player that he may sit on the piano.
The great thing about a painter is that he or she lives on – I mean, Andrew Wyeth is more in his paintings than he was walking around.
A great painter can paint something really complex, but they can crystallize it into something really simple.
The ability to be the first African-American painter to paint the first African-American president of the United States is absolutely overwhelming. It doesn’t get any better than that.
All my siblings became artists. One’s a novelist, my brother is a painter, my sister was a costume designer.
I started out to be a painter and was born into the theater.
Free time keeps me going. It’s just something that’s always been a part of my life. I was originally a painter, and I made films sort of as an extension of that, and then I started to try to make dramatic films because the early films were experimental films.
I don’t think money can help you become a better painter, for sure. You can have all the studios you want; it won’t help you make a better painting.
Did you know that da Vinci was a painter, polymath, engineer, architect, biologist, and writer all rolled into one? He drew sketches of helicopters at a time when they weren’t even invented!
Watching my stepfather and mother working in the industry – acting and composing – and seeing firsthand how difficult it is to achieve a successful career in the theater, I thought it might be safer to go to art school with the aim of becoming a painter.
I have never been much of a painter.
My parents always knew that I loved music. They just didn’t think I’d try to make it a career. They thought I’d be a painter or an art teacher or something like that.
When you act in a film, you’re inevitably surrounded by people you didn’t choose, right down to the set painter. I like being able to pick the family I’m waking up to in the morning that’s going to make this group effort to tell a story that applies to what’s interesting to me at that stage in my life.
There are two things in the painter, the eye and the mind; each of them should aid the other.
I’m 38 years old and Limp Bizkit is just something I do. If I was a painter, it would just be a type of painting I make.
In order for me to be successful… In order to be a great artist – musician, actor, painter, whatever – you must be able to be private in public at all times. That is what we do.
I adore the theater and I am a painter. I think the two are made for a marriage of love. I will give all my soul to prove this once more.
I’m a little bit of an obsessed artist, and I’m not very talented. But isn’t Suzanne Somers a bad painter?
My mother’s father was from Brazil – a painter, and not a famous one – and was always broke. But he was a free spirit, a great grandfather.
I have a talent for happiness. I look with the eyes of a painter, and I see beauty.
I have sisters who act, and I’d always seen it as their thing. I was never in the school plays like them – I wanted to be a painter.
Art has been good for my soul. And it’s been good for my brain. I think I’m a better painter now than I was a musician growing up. You struggle to see things and translate an image through your hands to a canvas.
If I live near a dancer or a painter, or a clarinet player comes from my neighborhood, I take some pleasure in that, feel a little more as if I come from someplace in particular.
A painter must think of everything he sees as being there entirely for his own use and pleasure.
Cummings’ career as a writer – and a painter – was as wobbly as his love life. He tried his hand at playwriting, satirical essays, and even a dance scenario for Lincoln Kirsten.
Art doesn’t alter things. It points things out, but it doesn’t alter them. It can’t, no matter what a painter wants to do.
I’m just a landscape painter. I look out the window and I see what’s going on, and I paint it. While I’m painting it, I also write thoughts about what I see going on out there.
When I said I no longer wanted to be a painter, that I wanted to be an actor, the first thing I did was get a stinking job in an insurance building.
One of the biggest changes that ever occurred in my life was going from the isolation of working part-time as a house painter in Henderson County, to Cornell, where everybody was a literary person.
The musician writes for the orchestra what his inner voice sings to him; the painter rarely relies without disadvantage solely upon the images which his inner eye presents to him; nature gives him his forms, study governs his combinations of them.
As a painter, it seemed easier to sort of disappear.
I’m a much better filmmaker than painter. But studying it did make me visually acute and taught me lessons like being economic: Say something once and you don’t have to say it again.
The painter has total control over what they’re showing to the viewer.
You can’t prove Rembrandt is better than Norman Rockwell – although if you actually do prefer Rockwell, I’d say you were shunning complexity, were secretly conservative, and hadn’t really looked at either painter’s work. Taste is a blood sport.
The truth is, the difference between a studio photographer and a photojournalist is the same as the difference between a political cartoonist and an abstract painter; the only thing the two have in common is the blank page. The jobs entail different talents and different desires.
I’m reading a book about Romaine Brooks, a wonderful painter from early in the last century.
When I arrived at Roma, someone defined me as Giotto, ‘The Painter,’ but the nickname I prefer is the one I got from Captain Francesco Totti, ‘The Little Prince.’
In traditional Asian arts, the word and the picture always sit next to each other. I have an aunt, a Chinese brush painter, who told me that when you do a Chinese brush painting, you have to pair the image up with some poetry.
