I just say I’m an artist who works with pictures and words.
Like most people – unless they’re very practised at it or have no warm blood at all in their veins – I feel a little apprehensive about the red carpet. It’s always a bit bewildering when people are taking pictures and asking questions before the ceremony.
I really enjoy the iPad because you can multi-task: I can watch a movie, read, look at pictures that I shot – because I’m into photography. It serves a lot of purposes for me.
I never thought I’d land in pictures with a face like mine.
These small shows were decidedly a success. The exhibitions were not too large to be seen easily. It was not an effort, as larger collections of pictures usually are.
If the paying public demands naturalistic art, then an artist can use his skills to produce such pictures – but these are to be clearly distinguished from the artist’s own art.
The weirdest request I got was for a picture of me naked with nothing on but my cowboy boots. Needless to say, she went home empty-handed. I have, however, on several occasions, strolled around my apartment in nothing but my cowboy boots. There was just no one there to take pictures.
The pictures are created by the listener, with a little help from the broadcaster. The pictures are perfect. If you’re showing pictures, different things in that picture can distract from the spoken word.
‘Halo’ I wrote with my grandpa in his nursing home. When I went to visit him, he’d often comment on my halo. But of course, I couldn’t see. And he always – he had pictures of Jesus with these beautiful halos. And so I asked him if he’d write a song with me about Jesus’ halo.
When I went to Jamia, I thought I wanted to be a cinematographer or photographer because I liked telling stories in pictures, but my teachers explained that if you want to tell your own stories then that is what a director does.
Credit or debit cards, for starters, are nothing short of shoppers’ Novocain. Even in the age of digital purchases and virtual money, we still attach a special value to dirty paper with pictures of presidents on it. Handing some of that to a cashier simply hurts more than handing over a little sliver of plastic.
Like lots of baby boomers, I was brought up on archaic anthropomorphism. Upstanding Christian dogs. Rabbits with family values. Because the ancient texts and pictures were sacred – Potter, Milne and the rest. Even concerned parents who knew Freud and Jung never saw the contradictions in feeding us on them.
I suddenly realized that the fellow who didn’t show up was getting about fifty-times more money than I was getting. So I thought, ‘this is silly,’ and became an actor. I certainly never thought I’d wind up in motion pictures. That was far beyond anything I’d ever dreamed of.
I’m not particular. I don’t have favourite pictures.
Sometimes I think all my pictures are just pictures of me.
A thing that you see in my pictures is that I was not afraid to fall in love with these people.
In the Fifties, my parents were known as ‘America’s sweethearts’. Their pictures graced the covers of all the newspapers. They were the Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston of their day.
