I’ve been attracted to imagery and occasionally I’ve drawn from it, but I never thought I’d be painting these paintings. I didn’t have any desire to. I didn’t think there was any reason to.
I dream of painting and then I paint my dream.
I liked painting and drawing, and I liked humanities mainly – poetry, literature – this speculative attitude toward life.
Good painting is the kind that looks like sculpture.
I like building houses, working as a carpenter, painting. You work with your hands to the best of your ability, and at the end of the day, you go home with some satisfaction: ‘I built that!’
I always work out of uncertainty but when a painting’s finished it becomes a fixed idea, apparently a final statement. In time though, uncertainty returns… your thought process goes on.
Back to the painting of the Sistine Chapel, there’s always been run-ins between benefactors and artists.
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.
When I was in art college, I would be painting, and I would create something on a canvas that was actually quite attractive. But if I got frightened and tried to protect that, that canvas would die.
I still have an old painting the Colonel gave me. It was the first time the Colonel had been back to the Hilton since Elvis had passed away.
I don’t work from drawings. I don’t make sketches and drawings and color sketches into a final painting.
I am like a security camera ever on the watch. The furtive quality of vision feels to me like an incredibly valuable weapon. Everything I see gets transformed into a private sketch or painting in my mind, stored away for future reference, future evidence, future ammunition.
I’m painting the paintings that I want to see in museums. And I’m hopefully presenting them in a way that’s universal enough that they become representative of something different than just a black body on a canvas.
My only worry is the painting I’m doing. Nothing else.
The mere drawing and painting world of the pattern designer and the applied artist must become a world that builds again.
I’ve been asked which of the other arts novel-writing is most like, and I have come to believe it is acting. Of course, in terms of pattern it can be like music, in terms of structure it can be like painting, but the job to me is most like acting.
Painting is not what my life is about, but it is very important to me, and I am very lucky to be able to give some time to it.
Painting will have to deal more fully and less obliquely with life and nature’s phenomena before it can again become great.
But painting can be too lonely… I like being with people too much to have ever made that my life’s work.
Rock & roll is not obscure, it’s really easy to understand. So is my painting.
My paintings have gotten to be pretty popular and I’ve taken a little bit more interest in painting the last few years. In fact, my novel that I wrote not too long ago, ‘The Hornet’s Nest,’ I painted the cover picture for it and I do a good bit of painting now.
What do you see when you look at a representational painting? Most of the time, the first thing I see is a flat piece of canvas covered with colored patterns.
I wasn’t interested in going to the school dances. I wasn’t interested in going to the football games. What I wanted was to be in my room painting my walls and doing weird stuff. That’s what I wanted and I got to do what I wanted, so that, to me, is my high school experience.
Painting seems like some kind of peculiar miracle that I need to have again and again.
Not all paintings are abstract; they’re not all Jackson Pollock. There’s value in a photograph of a man alone on a boat at sea, and there is value in painting of a man alone on a boat at sea. In the painting, the painting has more freedom to express an idea, more latitude in being able to elicit certain emotion.
Painting calmed the chaos that shook my soul.
If London is a watercolor, New York is an oil painting.
My painting carries with it the message of pain.
I love painting and music, of course. I don’t know nearly as much about them as I know about poetry. I’ve certainly been influenced by fiction. I was overwhelmed by War and Peace when I read it, and I didn’t read it until I was in my late 20s.
Sunlight is painting.
Sculpture will last a lot longer than painting.
Don’t put needless expense into painting a head! Don’t try to match tints! Rose and pearly colours blend into each other so that no one can unite them if painted separately. Keep the impression of your subject as one thing!
In the early Seventies, I bought a dilapidated hotel in north Stoke for about £100,000 and spent the same amount again renovating it, putting in a guitar-shaped swimming pool, painting the bathrooms purple, and installing gold dolphin taps.
Painting is but another word for feeling.
When I was 18, I lived in Greenwich Village, New York, for nine months. At that time, I wanted to change the world, not through architecture, but through painting. I lived the artist’s life, mingling with poets and writers, and working as a waiter. I was intrigued by the aliveness of the city.
I’ve been painting off and on since I was in sixth grade. I don’t paint when I’m acting – I’m not really able to split my focus that way. I do it intensely when I’m doing it, but I’m reluctant to take myself too seriously as a painter because that would mean there would be pressure to be better than I am.
On occasion I have drawn as a release from painting. The economy in using paper, pencil, charcoal and crayon can help towards a greater gamble and higher rewards. I also find that drawing can generate ideas more rapidly than painting.
I did painting before I did photography.
It is not your paintings I like, it is your painting.
When you drive, you are doing several things at once. You are using your eyes, ears, hands, your mind. If you have meditated for many years and have reached a lofty height in your meditation, as I have, you can meditate while running and cycling and painting.
Until film is just as easily accessible as a pen or pencil, then it’s not completely an art form. In painting, you can just pick up a piece of chalk, a stick, or whatever. In sculpture, you can get a rock. Writing, you just need a pencil and paper. Film has been a very elitist medium. It costs so much money.
As a teenager I started painting and playing guitar.
I think photography is closest to writing, not painting. It’s closest to writing because you are using this machine to convey an idea. The image shouldn’t need a caption; it should already convey an idea.
Every song is like a painting.
In the fairy tale the painting represents the here and now. The book is actually divided into five sections, through which the key character, the muse, leads us.
If the weather is good I go into the nearby wood – there I am painting a small beech forest (in the sun) with a few conifers mixed in. This takes until 8 ‘o clock.
My mother painted and wrote. She always had a painting in progress on an easel in the kitchen, so our house always smelled like oil paint. At night, she wrote after she’d put my sisters and me to bed, and the sound of her typing was our lullaby.
My painting does not come from the easel.
I feel lucky that I’ve been able to make a living from painting any idea that comes into my head.
I felt I really wanted to back off from music completely and just work within the visual arts in some way. I started painting quite passionately at that time.
I try to not get to the point where one is making wallpaper, or simply painting money. I want to make sure that I am at least trying to weigh myself down, that there’s a challenge each time.
When I was in high school, I was going to be a painter because I had a facility for painting. I could do it, but I didn’t have anything to say in that medium.
I always feel attacked when I’m asked about my painting.
One drawing demands to become a painting, so I start to work on that, and then the painting might demand something else. Then the painting might say, ‘I want a companion, and the companion should be like this,’ so I have to find that, either by drawing it myself or locating the image.
Futurists wanted to suggest movement by means of a dynamic painting; Duchamp applies the notion of delay – or, rather, or analysis – to movement.
I was really serious about painting, so I could never be a Sunday painter. You can’t just switch it on and off.
I have been surrounded by artists and paintings throughout my life. My father Ted Dyer is an artist, and from a very early age I have spent time painting and drawing.
Painting is not for me either decorative amusement, or the plastic invention of felt reality; it must be every time: invention, discovery, revelation.
I look at music like an art form, so it’s almost like painting for me, you know?
When I get my hands on painting materials I don’t give a damn about other people’s painting… every generation must start again afresh.
It used to be that if you stood in front of a painting you didn’t understand, you’d have some obligation to guess. Now you don’t.
