To feel the grace of God in a painting of the dear, quiet commonness of a domestic interior, or in a landscape, seascape, cityscape, trains us to feel the grace of God in the thing itself in situ.
Painting is much more than therapy to me its a way of life.
I was a hyperactive kid, and it took awhile for me to find the right teacher. My master was a Shaolin kung fu teacher, but he also taught tai chi, Chinese medicine, brush painting – he was adept at all facets of Chinese culture.
Very quickly a painting is turned into a facsimile of itself when one becomes so familiar with with it that one recognizes it without looking at it.
In the beginning, I started doing portraits of children, and of course, children have large eyes. For some reason, they just started getting bigger and bigger. Then, when I started painting imaginary children rather than real ones, they became bigger still.
If I’m away from painting for a week, I get bored.
Photography is about finding things. And painting is different – it’s about making something.
The older painting – well, it does have an effect all at once, I suppose, but it’s of a lesser intensity than a lot of the American work in the last ten or fifteen years.
With proper acting, I don’t know what I would play – I got sent a script for a play, and it said in the notes that my proposed character was ‘hideously fat and ugly’. That made my day. I mean, I do know I am no oil painting.
Our experience of any painting is always the latest line in a long conversation we’ve been having with painting. There’s no way of looking at art as though you hadn’t seen art before.
When I can focus on something like guitar or painting, I do. I started painting people I admire, like Kerouac, Bob Dylan, Nelson Algren, Marlon Brando, Patti Smith, my girl, my kids.
My sister-in-law is a painter, and I’ll say, how long did it take you to paint that painting. She’ll say, It took me maybe three days, but it took me all my life to get the skills to paint that painting.
Because fashion essentially is art, and as an artist and someone who is also a musician and an artist in regards to drawing and painting, anything I can do that expresses my feelings is something I’m really drawn to.
When I’m painting and drawing I only do people. Acting is obviously portraiture – and writing is as well.
We have as many planes of speech as does a painting planes of perspective which create perspective in a phrase. The most important word stands out most vividly defined in the very foreground of the sound plane. Less important words create a series of deeper planes.
Together let us desire, conceive, and create the new structure of the future, which will embrace architecture and sculpture and painting in one unity and which will one day rise toward Heaven from the hands of a million workers like the crystal symbol of a new faith.
Only by painting the great panorama of history, can the great history-reading public be entertained or satisfied.
He greatly valued his possessions, chiefly because they were his, and derived genuine pleasure from contemplating a painting, a statuette, a rare lace curtain – no matter what – after he had bought it and placed it among his household gods.
A painting doesn’t have to have a real usability other than you looking at it. Obviously, a car, an engine, or battery has to fit people’s needs.
I spend my afternoons painting and working on my Open Hearts jewelry line for Kay Jewelers. I designed an image of a heart that isn’t completely closed. My mom always told me to live with an open heart – when life gets tough, you should go out and help someone else.
In a movie, you’re raw material, just a hue of some color and the director makes the painting.
When I work alone, my process is like painting. With Fleetwood Mac, it’s more like movie making.
When I’m painting the picture, I’m really painting a picture. I may have a flat-footed technique, or something like that, but still, to me, the thrill, or the meat of the thing, is the actual painting. I don’t get any thrill out of laying it out.
Like in great painting and architecture, in couture, to make clothes you must eliminate, eliminate, eliminate to obtain the true sense of a line. You see, the more you add, the more you load on, the more it’s mad. You must try to have just the silhouette, which is an intelligence in clothes.
You don’t eat a painting of an apple; you don’t find it morally good. Instead, it tells you something strange about apples in themselves.
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.
The messages that my work might contain, the verbal aspects, the use of words, certainly I never mean for it to be more than – shall we say? – fifty percent of the total, and sometimes my active interest is much less than that. It is the formal aspect of my painting which fascinates me most.
I have a painting where somebody’s holding a chicken, and underneath the chicken is somebody’s head.
Painting contains a divine force which… makes the dead seem almost alive.
I wrote ‘My Name is Red’ just to remember painting, where the hand does it before the intellect. When I’m captive to it, I’m a happier person. Kierkegaard tells us that a happy person is someone who lives in the present; the unhappy person, someone who lives either in the past or the future.
It was only after I began to write fiction that I found a way to connect with painting.
The idea of being close to where pigments were mined – that’s the first thing in making a painting, getting the material. And what’s the last thing you do in making a painting? You put a frame around it.
In the ‘Nude Descending a Staircase,’ I wanted to create a static image of movement: movement is an abstraction, a deduction articulated within the painting, without our knowing if a real person is or isn’t descending an equally real staircase.
I’m sickened by all religions. Religion has divided people. I don’t think there’s any difference between the pope wearing a large hat and parading around with a smoking purse and an African painting his face white and praying to a rock.
I think of painting without subject matter as music without words.
Also, painting and animation are really solitary pursuits, so the collaborative aspects of music making and acting are pretty welcome sometimes.
I found I have to stay painting.
To make money, I did portraits . The truth is so bizarre! I’m kind of embarrassed. I was like a 19th-century pirate painter. I’d say, ‘Your mom would love a painting of you!’ A salesman! I’d hawk paintings.
I believe the reason I love painting so much is that it forces one to be objective.
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.
In America, the only truly popular art form is the movies. Most people consider painting a hobby and literature, schoolwork.
Painting becomes interesting when it becomes timeless.
The conceptual artist Ai WeiWei illustrates the schizoid society that rapid change has produced – sometimes by reassembling Ming-style furniture into absurd and useless arrangements, or by carefully painting and antiquing a Coca-Cola logo on an ancient Chinese pot.
Treasure is the kind of thing you dig up… or bury! And when people say, ‘Oh, he’s an icon,’ well, an icon is a very old painting hanging in a Russian church! If you want to say something, say something nice about me. Don’t call me a national treasure.
Painting is about the world that we live in. Black men live in the world. My choice is to include them.
I do have a dream, a painting, the baths of La Grenouillere for which I’ve done a few bad rough sketches, but it is a dream. Renoir, who has just spent two months here, also wants to do this painting.
Painting is a field that attracts a lot of lazy people. You can just sort of sit and wait for things to come to you. I know a lot of painters who’ll sit and chat it up all night. But God, I just can’t do that.
A painting is a symbol for the universe. Inside it, each piece relates to the other. Each piece is only answerable to the rest of that little world. So, probably in the total universe, there is that kind of total harmony, but we get only little tastes of it.
My whole purpose of taking on miniature painting was to break the tradition, to experiment with it, to find new ways of making meaning, to question the relevance of it.
The greatest advances of civilization, whether in architecture or painting, in science and literature, in industry or agriculture, have never come from centralized government.
The only thing in life that really gives me any peace is just being lost in the process of creating something, whether it’s the film or painting and drawing, which has been a big part of my life, for a long time.
If I had to compare myself to another artist, I wouldn’t. I feel like my lyrics are really strong. I’m good at painting pictures and telling picture stories.
I was not out to paint beautiful pictures; even painting good pictures was not important to me. I wanted only to help the truth burst forth.
