Your creativity before it gets formed into words and songs is the actual substance. No one else can see it, right? Unless you give it the shape of a song or a painting or whatever.
I always sang. I wanted to be in a band with my sister, and I was, at 11. At 12, I started writing seriously, and that was my pacifier all through high school – that and painting.
I decided one day to put on my tutu and jump on the coffee table and sing Aretha Franklin songs for the painters that were painting the house.
See, a painting is much cheaper than making a film. And photography is, you know, way cheap. So if I get an idea for a film, there are many ways to get it together and go realise that film. There’s really nothing to be afraid of.
I like the feeling of not knowing where to look when you are only performing for one person or watching someone practice. It creates this kind of a strange in-between, which can be mirrored in the feeling of making a painting.
I have always been structured. What has changed is the proportions. Now it is eight hours of paperwork and one of painting.
I started playing piano when I was 6. And I knew that wanted to be involved in that form of expression, whether it was through music, or acting, or dancing, or painting, or writing.
Parks are works of art just as a painting or sculpture is.
If they were starting their careers today, Rockwell and Picasso would probably both be painting on black velvet.
Every writer has their rituals. For me, it’s morning walks along the beach. And then, in my study I have a huge painting of the Black Madonna hung over my desk, and quite a few pictures of Mary around me for inspiration.
Very rarely is there any confusion as to when a painting or a song is finished. You just know when it’s done.
Photography, painting or poetry – those are just extensions of me, how I perceive things; they are my way of communicating.
Well, I have a very simple method of painting.
If commercialization is putting my art on a shirt so that a kid who can’t afford a $30,000 painting can buy one, then I’m all for it.
I love painting.
I think a painting is more like the real world if it’s made out the real world.
When you’re a fledgling youth-type adult, it appears that all people in their 40s look old enough to be in a painting hanging on the wall of a stately home in England. It’s not until you limp into your 70s that people in their 40s look too young to vote, and college cheerleaders closely resemble Yorkshire terriers.
In painting you must give the idea of the true by means of the false.
I’m quite sure that all true professional artists, of every description, in all walks of life, whether their craft is painting, music, sculpture, medicine or anything, have one primary concern – mankind.
It’s not about perfection. What’s a perfect painting? What’s interesting about a perfect painting?
When you’re a kid, and someone’s an artist, you think of Leonardo da Vinci. You don’t think that’s a job; you just think of a man with a beard, painting the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.
My movement from painting to film was a very conscious one.
He drove his kind of realism at me so hard I bounced right into nonobjective painting.
Mostly people are ignorant, what is the language of painting. You know, they’re ignorant. It is so difficult to make them aware, but time will teach them.
I find painting a much slower process than comedy, where you can go a mile a minute verbally and hope to God that some of the people out there understand you.
Well, I’ve been painting for years. I just started doing a lot more in the last couple.
Painting is a nail to which I fasten my ideas.
Everybody thinks they know what art should be. But very few of them have the sense that is necessary to experience painting, that is the sense of sight, that sees colors and forms as living reality in the picture.
Every play I do, every book I write, every painting I paint, I will struggle with. I don’t know what it’s like for a project to come easy.
I dream a lot. I do more painting when I’m not painting. It’s in the subconscious.
At 18 I began painting steadily fulltime and at age 20 had my first New York show at the Macbeth Gallery.
I like to think of my work and the way people approach it in the same way people approach a Lichtenstein painting. You can write a one-hundred-page dissertation about why he used comics. Or it could be like, ‘This is cute!’
In our world, in which religious images are losing their meaning, in which our customs are getting more and more secular, we are losing our sense of the eternal. I think it’s a loss that has done a great deal of damage to modern art. Painting is a return to origins.
When Dick Avedon died, I was so upset that I just started painting.
You cannot just be working in a vast, air-conditioned loft space and think you are going to make a decent painting. Francis Bacon had a special studio built, and he felt completely emasculated in there. I have to be somewhere comfortable.
I hardly need to abstract things, for each object is unreal enough already, so unreal that I can only make it real by means of painting.
Drawing and visual pursuits were first. Music came and found me in a way. Really, what it’s about is creative problem solving, and music is a lot more an expression of that than painting is for me.
The surrealists, and the modern movement in painting as a whole, seemed to offer a key to the strange postwar world with its threat of nuclear war. The dislocations and ambiguities, in cubism and abstract art as well as the surrealists, reminded me of my childhood in Shanghai.
I’m never interested in the painting being a mirror to culture. I think that’s really boring. What I’m interested in is painting as an affective space. The place where the hierarchies of the world can be rearranged within the space of a painting. And they can be articulated in different ways.
Every milieu has something ridiculous about it – film-making, the music world, painting – because people who take themselves seriously become funny pretty quickly.
How do you make something the same but different? That’s the question I had to deal with in my approach to the cover painting for ‘Percy Jackson’s Greek Heroes.’ I wanted it to have many similarities to ‘Percy Jackson’s Greek Gods,’ but I knew they couldn’t be too similar.
Painting bodies with the patterns of Kusama’s hallucinations obliterated their individual selves and returned them to the infinite universe.
When I moved to New York, I was waiting tables, painting in the daytime and working at night, and I felt it was possible to find a balance and just about get by.
I don’t see myself as a photographer. I still see the photographs and collages as a resource for the painting.
My parents felt that acting was far too insecure. Don’t ask me what made them think that painting would be more secure.
Painting is an infinitely minute part of my personality.
A sculpture is just a painting cut out and stood up somewhere.
My painting teacher in high school used to say, ‘I can’t paint like I want to, but through practice I’ll get better.’ But I don’t think that’s true. I think sometimes you just can’t paint.
When I was younger, I had no interest. But after I went to Paris to see the collections for the first time a few years ago, they made a huge impression on me. I realized that fashion is an art form, like acting or painting.
When things become peculiar, frustrating and strange, I think it’s a good time to start painting.
I’m still very sure that painting is one of the most basic human capacities, like dancing and singing, that make sense, that stay with us, as something human.
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.
I couldn’t resist painting Orpheus and Charon on the River Styx. There was something strangely intriguing about seeing Orpheus playing his lyre as he is being shuttled across the river.
Someday, I plan to buy a house in Goa, do only one movie a year, and spend the rest of time painting, learning how to cook, cooking for friends, and doing yoga.
Nature engenders the science of painting.
The day the producers aren’t minting money, or the fans are done with me and, most of all, I as a person get bored of acting, I will stop and pursue my other interests. There is a lot to do: painting, writing, direction.
I’d always loved writing, in the same way that I’d loved painting. I wouldn’t have seen it as a career.
I have ADD or something. Even when I am doing something, it’s me on the computer, I’m painting and I’m writing music. I have to rotate what I’m doing every 15 minutes.
Scientifically, information is a choice – a yes-or-no choice. In a broader sense, information is everything that informs our world – writing, painting, music, money.
After my divorce, painting took me out of panic mode and into a serene, calm place. I could absolutely lose myself.
I still believe that the best art – be it music, comedy, painting, etc. – is the art that hasn’t been asked for, or is expected.
I hardly ever stretch the canvas before painting.
The small amount of people that control the discourse around painting – I thought that the whole museum world was just a bunch of phonies, and I didn’t really want to have anything to do with it. I guess I did installations, in a funny way, because they couldn’t be commodified.
