I’d asked around 10 or 15 people for suggestions. Finally one lady friend asked the right question, ‘Well, what do you love most?’ That’s how I started painting money.
There are only two styles of portrait painting; the serious and the smirk.
I liked sculpting better than painting. You have more freedom in sculpting.
I always see my songs in colors, and I’m often more inspired by movies and photographs than I am by other songs when I write my music. I’m also inspired by fashion, and I want my music to be a visual painting of what’s in my mind.
Never invest in anything that eats or needs painting.
In a painting, you can’t make out whether the artist painted the left eye before the right eye. In Chinese calligraphy, you can see the progression of the artist’s stroke.
Most painting in the European tradition was painting the mask. Modern art rejected all that. Our subject matter was the person behind the mask.
For me, painting is a way to forget life. It is a cry in the night, a strangled laugh.
Lend your ears to music, open your eyes to painting, and… stop thinking! Just ask yourself whether the work has enabled you to ‘walk about’ into a hitherto unknown world. If the answer is yes, what more do you want?
That’s why I ended up going to Lancaster University, because they had a visual arts course, and in the first year it was like a broad visual arts course in sculpture, painting, graphics – all of that.
For sheer creativity and totality of involvement, ‘Rolf’s Cartoon Club’ with HTV in Bristol was an amazing show to work on, but I think the ‘Rolf on Art’ series, culminating in the painting of the Queen’s portrait to celebrate her 80th birthday, just nudges into the favourite spot.
Art, a book, a painting, a song, can definitely inspire change, whether it’s a small change or a big change but you know there’s novels I’ve read or a scene in a film that I’ve seen where I definitely inspired something and made a change or addressed an issue in my life or done something cliche like make a phone call.
It’s the idea of a multi-sensory experience stemming from music that opened my interest into painting, to be honest.
People who look at my painting say that it makes them happy, like the feeling when you wake up in the morning. And happiness is the goal, isn’t it?
The detail adds an element of unexpected something. All fiction is false; what makes it convincing is that it runs alongside the truth. The real world has lots of incidental details, so a painting also has to have that element of imperfection and irregularity, those incidental details.
Around 1980, I went back to painting with a vengeance.
Because I went to Chouinard, which then became CalArts, I became a multi-discipline artist – it wasn’t just about painting, it was about media and performance.
I’ve always been a fan of poetry. I grew up with Lawrence Ferlinghetti and the Beat poets. I really followed that stuff for a while. I just love the way people threw words around like they were painting.
I didn’t know what to expect from a famous movie star; maybe that he’d be sort of stuck-up, you know. But not Gary Cooper. He horsed around so much… that I had a hard time painting him.
My primary thing is to make a painting, not necessarily to make a painting to sell for gazillions of dollars, but just to make a painting.
Years ago, when I was in Siena for the first time, I saw the works of Duccio, whose deeply emotional painting from the thirteenth century has never left me.
I like to write about painting because I think visually. I see my writing as blocks of color before it forms itself. I think I also care about painting because I’m not musical. Painting to me is not a metaphor for writing, but something people do that can never be reduced to words.
Destroying rainforest for economic gain is like burning a Renaissance painting to cook a meal.
I had always loved expressionist painting, like every European. In fact I admired it all the more because these were precisely the paintings despised by my father’s generation.
As a kid, I was always building things. My father had a shop in the house, and we built things – we were kind of a project family. I started out as a painter, and then painting led to cinema, and in cinema, you get to build so many things, or help build them.
I was always most interested in drawing – most of my childhood drawings are black-and-white line work. And when I kind of abandoned comics, through college and art school, I was doing a lot of painting. But once I started doing comics again, everything else just fell by the wayside.
I love Monet – I’ve nicknamed him King Blob. When you go up to the painting, it’s a series of blobs – amazing.
I’m irresponsible to my career in order to paint. Because painting is obsessive. I forget to eat. I forget to sleep.
90% of every art form is garbage – dance and stand-up, painting and music. Focus on the 10% that’s good, suck it up, and drive on.
I kind of do the drawing with the painting in mind, but it’s very hard to guess at a size or a color and all the colors around it and what it will really look like.
I’m old fashioned. I really think you should know how to draw before you start painting. I use charcoal and graphite; I put a skylight in. In my house, I turned the garage into an art studio. So I’m awash in art studios.
Painting is the passage from the chaos of the emotions to the order of the possible.
We have such a great depth of human history in all of the arts, whether it’s opera or mathematics or painting or classical music or jazz. There’s so many things to study, new books to read, and certainly always ways to transform old ideas and to come up with new ones.
My process is really quite organic, and starting a painting is one of the best parts for me. I always start in quite a loose and free way. I often put down one ground colour to begin with and then play off that.
I was always artistic – right from childhood – but my love of painting came a bit later. It followed my love of music.
Sketching is like dancing. It’s process as much as product. You can turn your head off and just sort of dissolve into the now. Doing a giant, super thought-out painting is the opposite of that.
I can very well do without God both in my life and in my painting, but I cannot, suffering as I am, do without something which is greater than I am, which is my life, the power to create.
I’m interested in painting the most beautifully compelling pictures and images and metaphors and stories and explanations possible that will put Jesus in language for a world that desperately needs to hear it.
My father made sure that I had lots of levels of education – from ballroom-dancing to painting, commando training, theatre and magic.
Lovers of painting and lovers of music are people who openly display their preference like a delectable ailment that isolates them and makes them proud.
After tea it’s back to painting – a large poplar at dusk with a gathering storm. From time to time instead of this evening painting session I go bowling in one of the neighbouring villages, but not very often.
By the mid-’60s, recorded music was much more like painting than it was like traditional music. When you went into the studio, you could put a sound down, then you could squeeze it around, spread it all around the canvas.
I think of my peace paintings as one long poem, with each painting being a single stanza.
You can’t make a perfect painting. We can see perfection in our minds. But we can’t make a perfect painting.
I don’t get my inspiration from books or a painting. I get it from the women I meet.
Nobody really needs a painting. It’s something you kind of create value for in a way that you don’t with a company. It’s an act of collective faith what an object is worth. Maintaining that value system is part of what a dealer does, not just making a transaction but making sure that important art feels important.
If it weren’t for how esoteric the art world likes to be, I would love actually to play the music in the shows, painting the music that influences me most.
I’ve spent a long time avoiding painting and dealing with it from a distance. But as I get older, I’m more comfortable with it.
It all has to do with art – writing, painting, things I’ve done for a long time but just never had enough time to pursue. I have poetry – things that are designed for songs, but they’re always poems first.
The dance commonly begins about the middle of the afternoon or later, after sundown. When it begins in the afternoon, there is always an intermission of an hour or two for supper. The preliminary painting and dressing is usually the work of about two hours.
Language is much closer to film than painting is.
I had always loved cartoons, especially ‘Bugs Bunny,’ and I found I enjoyed making animated films. Even a 30-second commercial involved drawing and painting, storytelling, not to mention actors, music, and sound effects.
To some extent, the act of creation and the act of selling are hard to disentangle. If you create something, whether it’s a painting or a company, I think if you care about it, you have some obligation to go out and tell people about it.
Some people would ask: ‘You are not the one who does the painting, or shot the work, how can it be your work?’ But I was the one who chose which site we should use, and which assistant helps me to do the painting, or the shot.
