Abstract painting seeks to be a pure pictorial language, and thus attempts to escape the essential impurity of all languages: the recourse to signs or forms that have meanings shared by everyone.
Good painting is like good cooking; it can be tasted, but not explained.
Every viewer is going to get a different thing. That’s the thing about painting, photography, cinema.
Painting is silent poetry, and poetry is painting that speaks.
Usually, I am a compulsive person, and I need – sometimes urgently – to paint… Painting is close to poetry, is a kind of poetry expressed visually. It has to be spontaneous, rapid – at least in my case.
I’m a classically trained painter, and I was an illustrator in New York working with Fortune 500s companies as well as the NBA and the Olympics. I first got into sculpting when I created a sculpture based on a painting I had done for the 1984 Olympics.
Everybody has called Pop Art ‘American’ painting, but it’s actually industrial painting.
Good painting is like good cooking; it can be tasted, but not explained.
I enjoy painting, cutting the lawn and working in the garden when I have time. That’s therapy for me. I enjoy working with my hands.
I have always enjoyed drawing and painting but I don’t always find the time to do much these days.
Owning vinyl is like having a beautiful painting hanging in your living room. It’s something you can hold, pore over the lyrics, and immerse yourself in the art work.
You care enough, that you want your life to be fulfilled in a living way, not in a painting way, not in a writing way… you really do want it to be involving in living, corresponding with other living objects, moving, changing, that kind of thing.
This truth must be recognized as a dogma and assume the validity of an axiom in the general understanding of painting.
I’ve always loved painting and drawing. I wish I’d developed it more and exhibited.
Painting’s not important. The important thing is keeping busy.
I have no fear of making changes, destroying the image, etc., because the painting has a life of its own.
Most of the power of painting comes through the manipulation of space… but I don’t understand that.
Lets tell young people the best books are yet to written; the best painting, the best government the best of everything is yet to be done by them.
My first artistic love was drawing and painting.
I’m a big fan of Edouard Vuillard, so I’d like anything by him – particularly a painting called ‘Madame Hessel on the Sofa.’ His work is realistic without being literal: I can really imagine what Madame Hessel is thinking.
Portland in particular is a cheap enough place to live that you can still develop your passion – painting, writing, music. People seem less status-conscious. Even wealthy people buy second-hand clothes and look a little bit homeless.
Painting and photography keep the creative channel open, and for an actor, it’s to keep alive, it’s to keep awake, it’s to keep watching, it’s to keep feeling, it’s to keep enjoying, to keep that sensuality of feeling alive.
Love is important. I didn’t have the energy to be giving it to somebody else in a way that they deserved, and I knew that. So I’ve always been scared to go too far with somebody I care for because I knew there would come a day when I’d need to pick up and finish a painting for the next three months. That day is inevitable.
More and more, as I grow older, I find myself looking for inspiration in painting, illustration, videogames, and old movies.
Painting directly from nature is difficult as things do not remain the same; the camera helps to retain the picture in your mind.
Painting is the representation of visible forms. The essence of realism is its negation of the ideal.
Photography suits the temper of this age – of active bodies and minds. It is a perfect medium for one whose mind is teeming with ideas, imagery, for a prolific worker who would be slowed down by painting or sculpting, for one who sees quickly and acts decisively, accurately.
Painting is a blind man’s profession. He paints not what he sees, but what he feels, what he tells himself about what he has seen.
I hope to actually get back to painting someday… soon. I sort of transitioned into cartooning from painting.
The point of painting is not really deception or imitation.
I believe that painting should come through the avenues of meditation rather than the canals of action.
If something sticks with me for a long time, it goes into a painting.
I had always planned to make a large painting of the early spring, when the first leaves are at the bottom of the trees, and they seem to float in space in a wonderful way. But the arrival of spring can’t be done in one picture.
If I had a Salvador Dali painting, I would cuddle it to sleep.
In fairness, I don’t think that everyone understands what I say, but I think they understand part of it and part of what the issues are… Just the same way that people like a good painting, I think people really like understanding, knowing about the world.
Within one hour of touching the brush to canvas for the first time, my students have a total, complete painting.
I don’t want to be a film-maker. I think painting is far more exciting and profound.
There’s this idea of bankers retiring and painting watercolours. You can’t dabble in art – it’s a life. Being a writer, an artist… is a whole life.
Painting is a language which cannot be replaced by another language. I don’t know what to say about what I paint, really.
Before anything else, I started painting bulls and matadors. That was my initiation to paint.
I hope that my painting has the impact of giving someone, as it did me, the feeling of his own totality, of his own separateness, of his own individuality.
When I was growing up, I wanted to be a house painter like my father, but I was always screwing up when I went to work with him. I had a talent for knocking over paint and painting myself into corners. I also realized fairly quickly that painting bored me.
My music is more than me writing a flashy soul song. They’re heartfelt songs about my family and true stories. I have also songs that aren’t personal, but just painting a picture. I don’t like being put under labels, but my music is going to continue to stay classic and timeless forever.
Movie making is not like other art forms, like painting, or writing a novel, because that can be digested or interpreted… It takes two years to make each one of these, and it’s always judged on money.
I’ve been doing this since I was a kid. Then, I got in trouble for painting like this on the wall, but now, I get paid for it.
I was attracted to a lot of different art forms – dancing, painting. But there’s something about music that people hold so close. It’s such a powerful art form, and that’s why I live for it.
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’m not going to stop painting just to take orders.
At art college, I started to do music and then painting and drawing – and that would have been my ideal life, to be an artist and be paid for it, to be able to create stuff. I realized it was difficult, but I don’t know if I had the application for it.
And also the new excitement and variety of ways that the abstract expressionists were applying paint. You could put it on as though it were colored air and it would be painting.
I have generally found that persons who had studied painting least were the best judges of it.
My hobbies away from horse racing would be reading and painting; I love art.
When superstition is allowed to perform the task of old age in dulling the human temperament, we can say goodbye to all excellence in poetry, in painting, and in music.
Painting does what we cannot do – it brings a three-dimensional world into a two-dimensional plane.
When I’m not painting, I’m Oujia-boarding with my photos. I’ll sort through my pictures, put them in different folders, and come back months later to one in particular and try to figure out why I took it.
Painting, n.: The art of protecting flat surfaces from the weather, and exposing them to the critic.
No painting is ever not an infinitely reproducible image any more.
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.
Now I’m a painter. That was another opportunity I was able to pursue, I’ve been painting all my life, now it’s become a second career because of my success in the movies.
Remember that a painting – before it is a battle horse, a nude model, or some anecdote – is essentially a flat surface covered with colours assembled in a certain order.
You can’t work in the movies. Movies are all about lighting. Very few filmmakers will concentrate on the story. You get very little rehearsal time, so anything you do onscreen is a kind of speed painting.
I was always interested in the arts as a child – drawing, painting, and piano – but acting became a favourite. I was a major theatre geek in high school – if I wasn’t in the drama room at lunch rehearsing, I’d be in the art room finishing up some type of project.
