It takes a lot of imagination to be a good photographer. You need less imagination to be a painter because you can invent things. But in photography everything is so ordinary; it takes a lot of looking before you learn to see the extraordinary.
No one can be a painter unless he cares for painting above all else.
It’s the director’s job to piece together my performance, his interpretation of my takes, each take, and string them together and make a statement. I’m red paint on a canvas for a painter.
I’m glad movies aren’t going to please everybody, they can’t. But what they have to be is recognisable. I don’t equate myself with a master painter, but I think you can recognise my films.
I was born in Den Bosch, where the painter Hieronymus Bosch named himself after. And so I’ve always been very fond of this painter who lived and worked in the 15th century.
I am obsessed with the painter Jonas Wood, but I don’t think I’ll ever be able to afford one of his paintings. He’s an L.A.-based painter; his stuff is incredible.
Being a painter is the only profession where you have to stand there with all your shortcomings on the wall.
Who sees the human face correctly: the photographer, the mirror, or the painter?
And I started with this: I have not painted at all my childhood. In fact, I never painted. But I helped my father who was a house painter and decorative painter. He made stage sets, he made glass paintings, he made everything.
I’m a very strange painter. I don’t wake up one day and say, ‘God, isn’t this a fantastic day, I’d better get out and paint!’ I think my father’s more that way, because he’s very fast.
Dali was the great painter then and surrealism was a way of life.
If I hadn’t gone into the theater, I would be a painter.
I’m a painter in sound.
I painted. I wanted to be a painter. I sang.
The poet, being an imitator like a painter or any other artist, must of necessity imitate one of three objects – things as they were or are, things as they are said or thought to be, or things as they ought to be. The vehicle of expression is language – either current terms or, it may be, rare words or metaphors.
The term ‘renaissance man’ is always bandied about. I don’t think that applies to me. You think about Leonardo da Vinci, and he was a painter and a physicist and an architect, and that is a true renaissance man.
I would say any creative person has that: you can’t just force a topic. Whether you’re a painter, you want to do a cartoon. Anything. Something may come up that’s not your style or suited to what you are working on at the moment. So you file it away and hopefully find a place for it.
My mum was working in Walmart for €350 per month, about £280. My father was working as a house painter. We had a difficult situation with money.
New needs need new techniques. And the modern artists have found new ways and new means of making their statements… the modern painter cannot express this age, the airplane, the atom bomb, the radio, in the old forms of the Renaissance or of any other past culture.
My father was a painter, so I was encouraged to take a sketchbook everywhere. Cameras are perishable, but I still have tonnes of sketchbooks from all the trips I’ve ever been on. It gets you by when you don’t know what to give people as a gift; drawings are good souvenirs.
When I was in high school, I was going to be a painter because I had a facility for painting. I could do it, but I didn’t have anything to say in that medium.
I didn’t have any real art training, but when I was about twelve nad thirteen, another boy and I went to a sign painter’s house every Friday night and took lessons.
Sketching is almost everything. It is the painter’s identity, his style, his conviction, and then color is just a gift to the drawing.
I don’t consider myself as a great painter; I just feel that art is about expressing your emotions and expressing your feelings, and music is the same way; you can see what other people are going through.
A mathematician, like a painter or poet, is a maker of patterns. If his patterns are more permanent than theirs, it is because they are made with ideas.
When I was 12 years old, I went to Natchitoches, La.; it was summer vacation with my family. We visited a plantation, Melrose. And I met an Afro-American woman who was a painter. I already had some idea of what I wanted to do in life, and one of the things that interested me was painting.
I began photographing in 1946. Before that, I was a painter and drawer, with my mother and father’s support. They were a bit pissed when I went into photography. They thought photographers were guys who took pictures at weddings.
Whatever China I’d been born into, I would probably still have become a painter – I loved sketching portraits as a child, and began art classes at the age 7. But if China hadn’t been under Maoist rule, I might never have become a writer.
It took a while for anyone to want to publish ‘To Repel Ghosts.’ I thought people would want to publish a three-hundred-and-fifty-page book about a dead painter, but they didn’t.
I hope to be a producer, a musician, a painter, a photographer – I’m going to push myself to do as many things as I can and see where it goes.
I believe everything creative is somewhat collaborative. If you’re a painter and someone stretches your canvas, it was collaborative on some level.
I never knew what my role in art was, because I was such a deep appreciator and such a passionate appreciator. But every time I would try to sit down and be an illustrator or painter, it was just not my best use.
Historically, the women who have been the great painters of the canon have very often have been the wives or daughters of supportive men. Like Artemisia, whose father was a very established painter. I will say that the two current contemporary artists I admire the most are women: Kara Walker and Swoon.
Sculpture is the best comment that a painter can make on painting.
The painter must enclose himself within his work; he must respond not with words, but with paintings.
My dad’s wife, my stepmom, is a serious painter. My dad also paints. My mother is a brilliant sculptor, and her husband is a sculptor.
There is nothing that special to see when looking at me. I’m a painter who paints day in day out, from morning till evening – figure pictures and landscapes, more rarely portraits.
I’m like a painter who has had his different periods: jazz, soul, pop, psychedelia, varietes.
One of the big surprises for me about Einstein was… that he wasn’t this big introvert; he was more like a novelist or a painter. It’s amazing how close society came to not benefiting from Albert Einstein’s genius.
The humblest painter is a true scholar; and the best of scholars the scholar of nature.
I really have to think of myself as a painter first because sculpture came much, much later. As a student at the Art Institute in Chicago, I simply never became involved in sculpture. I did prints, and I did paintings.
I’d just sort of gravitated toward the arts, and I had always loved music and really loved theater, even though I didn’t want to act. For some reason, being in Kansas, you can either be a graphic artist or a visual artist, so I decided, ‘I guess I’m going to be a painter.’
In 1983, I was working at an art gallery in Los Angeles and going to film school at Los Angeles City College. At that time, Jean-Michel Basquiat was a young painter and was visiting L.A. for his first show at the Larry Gagosian Gallery.
There are bathroom singers, but I am a bathroom painter. In other words, my art will stay inside the four walls of my house.
The mind of the painter must resemble a mirror, which always takes the colour of the object it reflects and is completely occupied by the images of as many objects as are in front of it.
I don’t want to put myself in any kind of a box as far as my sound goes, because being an artist is fluid. If you look at a painter’s work, a lot of times, it’s similar in style, but other times – over even a year’s period – it can change so much. I’m just going with the flow.
I started doing cartoons when I was about 21. I never thought I would be a cartoonist. It happened behind my back. I was always a painter and drawer.
A mathematician, like a painter or a poet, is a maker of patterns. If his patterns are more permanent than theirs, it is because they are made with ideas.
So I’ve tried to be this very eccentric character, and that works very well if you want to be a painter which I did once upon a time, if you want to be a musician which I did once upon a time. But if you want to make movies and you want to make challenging movies, you’ve got to be the sanest person in the room.
The painter leaves his mark. And I just put in two statues in Rhode Island that I’m working on. And I think that’s going to make me last longer than me.
I’ve always liked writing. Even when I was in art school and thought I was going to be a gallery painter, I liked to pair my artwork with writing. And so that naturally led to drawing comics.
I began drawing when I was nearly 3, and after finishing the sixth grade, I left school to paint and was tutored at home. My father didn’t think a formal education was necessary for a painter.
I was too practical to want to be a painter.
I spend a lot of time working as a painter and in my studio I go from upstairs where I paint to downstairs where I play and record, so I get this thing crossing over.
