The first painting that I realised I liked was ‘The Garden of Earthly Delights’ by Hieronymus Bosch, when I was six years old, at the Prado in Madrid. I still find myself returning there every time I’m in the city.
The poet is a specialist in something which everyone practises. Herein, poetry differs from the other arts. Everyone does not practise music or painting or even dancing, but everyone without exception puts together words poetically every day of his life.
As I had collaborated with visual artists before whether on installations, on performance pieces, in the context of theatre works and as I had taught for a time in art colleges the idea of writing music in response to painting was not alien.
I think it is an inborn talent – just luck. Some people can learn languages; some can throw a ball. Most people have something. My talent is drawing and painting.
For example, in painting the form arises from abstract elements of line and color, while in cinema the material concreteness of the image within the frame presents – as an element – the greatest difficulty in manipulation.
Painting puts me into an alpha state. It’s a private event. I make all the decisions in the process and never have to deal with the outside world.
I grew up loving horses. I was relatively obsessed, starting with my rocking horse at age 2, all the way through my painting and drawing phase.
When I started working on ambient music, my idea was to make music that was more like painting.
If I had been around when Rubens was painting, I would have been revered as a fabulous model. Kate Moss? Well, she would have been the paintbrush.
You don’t look at a painting and ask if the artist was gay or straight. I think it’s irrelevant in any situation – I don’t care if my garbageman is gay or straight as long as he picks up the garbage.
I have sworn to die painting.
Most days, I practice piano in the mornings and I spend the rest of the day painting.
For me, acting is about the art of it and it’s about being on a film set and doing your thing, painting a blank canvas.
To me, art begets art. Painting feeds the eye just as poetry feeds the ear, which is to say that both feed the soul.
Art works because it appeals to certain faculties of the mind. Music depends on details of the auditory system, painting and sculpture on the visual system. Poetry and literature depend on language.
To me, this was an oxymoron, doing a painting of a dancer. Dancers are always moving.
Every painting I do is related to the last one: it may be a continuation of a previous painting or it may be a reaction against it.
A painting has a lot of advantages over other forms of communication. Unlike a movie, you don’t have to put it into a machine and turn it on. It’s just there every day. It’s not limited by the element of time. It’s a constant part of the home.
The time that I devote to painting is not a lot of time, but I do it 100 percent while I am working, and then there’s nothing else that counts.
I don’t like getting out when I could be painting. And when I’m painting, I don’t want anybody else around.
I’m not so facile that I can accomplish or find out what I want to know or explore enough of the possibilities and a way of making a painting, say, in just one painting or two paintings.
I will keep painting until I die.
An artist makes a painting, and nobody bugs him or her about it. It’s just you and your painting. To me, that’s the way it should be with film as well.
Turning one’s novel into a movie script is rather like making a series of sketches for a painting that has long ago been finished and framed.
The trend in some of the contemporary movements in art, but by no means all, seems to deny this ideal and to me appears to lead to a purely decorative conception of painting.
I enjoy painting and can copy almost anything.
I began painting well before I started doing comedy. In fact, when I came out of the war in 1946, I enrolled in art school in Dayton, Ohio. I painted for three years, and then show business took hold.
Painting is so poetic, while sculpture is more logical and scientific and makes you worry about gravity.
I think you have to control the materials to an extent, but it’s important to let the materials have a kind of power for themselves; like the natural power of gravity, if you are painting on a wall, it makes the paint trickle and it drips; there is no reason to fight that.
You know, when I was younger I was into all kinds of art – drawing, painting, all that stuff. But I played drums, played piano forever.
Not that painting would have been a release. The reason for doing it is the desire to create. I’ve got to do it! I’ve seen that, I can still remember it, I’ve got to paint it.
I love painting. I went to college in fine arts, and I still do it all the time.
I was influenced by surrealist poetry and painting as were thousands of other people, and it seems to me to have become a part of the way I write, but it’s not.
I hope to be painting more and travelling. Maybe fall in love. Have a dog one day. You know, all the good things.
For pure joy, I look at a small painting by Arbit Blatas. An ocean liner is at the center of the composition, perhaps ready to depart. It holds the promise of discovery.
In my world, history comes down to language and art. No one cares much about what battles were fought, who won them and who lost them – unless there is a painting, a play, a song or a poem that speaks of the event.
As the books grew bigger and more ambitious, the situations in question sometimes became political ones, and so it became necessary to start painting in the social background on a scale which eventually became panoramic.
Painting constantly appeared to me as the one and only possible achievement.
The animation of the canvas is one of the hardest problems of painting.
I have to take it as a given that I have got a certain ability to do something. I can be an artist, which is take something and transform it into another thing. I can just see something, and I can see my painting.
There isn’t an amount of money you could offer me to do reality TV. I would rather get my job back on the building site. Or I could own a construction business. Maybe I could retire to my house in Long Island and take up painting, like Captain Beefheart. A crazy recluse: I like that idea.
During the war, women without nylons drew lines up the backs of their legs to give the illusion of silk stockings. Painting over grey hair with spray-on root touch-up – or even dark eyeshadow – is the Covid-19 equivalent.
Through a painting we can see the whole world.
Abstract painting is abstract. It confronts you. There was a reviewer a while back who wrote that my pictures didn’t have any beginning or any end. He didn’t mean it as a compliment, but it was.
I want to give my compliments to Australia. Ever since your government paid a few million dollars for a Jackson Pollack painting, I figure that it must be a marvellous country.
And I like the idea of change. Because I don’t see why we should hang a painting on the wall and then just not think of it anymore because it’s there like a piece of furniture.
There is no such thing as good painting about nothing.
I have always wanted to make paintings that are impossible to walk past, paintings that grab and hold your attention. The more you look at them, the more satisfying they become for the viewer. The more time you give to the painting, the more you get back.
When we don’t have information, we go to the simplest outlook, to black and white. But then we have to lie to ourselves. Black is never as black as you’re painting it and white is never as white.
On the floor I am more at ease. I feel nearer, more part of the painting, since this way I can walk around it, work from the four sides and literally be in the painting.
Every painting is a voyage into a sacred harbour.
There’s something always instinctively visually right about nature. There’s no difference, to my eye, between looking at a great painting and looking at nature. Because painting, when it’s great, has the same immutable rightness, unquestioned rightness, about it.
Painting is the representation of visible forms. The essence of realism is its negation of the ideal.
I’m sick of the foodies who need every morsel that goes into their mouth to be a Picasso painting, a Giacometti sculpture, a Proust novel, evoking the world with each crumb.
I’ve been working in sculpture and painting since 1920.
I started making work that I assumed would be far too garish, far too decadent, far too black for the world to care about. I, to this day, am thankful to whatever force there is out there that allows me to get away with painting the stories of people like me.
I had an idea for a technologically advanced luxury watch. I got involved in digital art and neon painting and put on shows of my work.
Sometimes I can see the whole painting from the outset in my mind’s eye. But more often than not, that idea doesn’t last the duration of the painting. Sometimes it comes out easy, just as I had envisaged. But that is reasonably rare.
I used a kind of gray-green early on in my practice for painting steel, to make it look more like it had a kind of patina to it, like copper and bronze and so on. The color I used was a Benjamin Moore color called 2012. My then-young daughter started calling me 2012 – it was my nickname.
