I acquired quite a lot of technical skill and got quite a long way with my painting, but I never felt I was doing what New Zealand was about with my paint.
Painting is a source of endless pleasure, but also of great anguish.
The majority of my work is from life. I spend most fine days from May to October painting outside.
I’m 38 years old and Limp Bizkit is just something I do. If I was a painter, it would just be a type of painting I make.
American poetry, like American painting, is always personal with an emphasis on the individuality of the poet.
I do some kind of work, whether writing or painting or recording, on a daily basis. And it’s so essential that when I’m involved in the actual process, my so-called ‘real life’ becomes almost incidental, which becomes worrying.
A brain scan may reveal the neural signs of anxiety, but a Kokoschka painting, or a Schiele self-portrait, reveals what an anxiety state really feels like. Both perspectives are necessary if we are to fully grasp the nature of the mind, yet they are rarely brought together.
It’s Frank’s painting on the cover. We were originally going to use a Salvador Dali painting that we got permission from Salvador Dali to use, and Frank found this one, and it really did fit the music much more.
With photography, you’ve captured a moment time – it’s that moment only – and in painting, you play with it; you manipulate how time is presented. It’s about fantasy and illusion and the creation of desire.
When I am finishing a picture, I hold some God-made object up to it – a rock, a flower, the branch of a tree or my hand – as a final test. If the painting stands up beside a thing man cannot make, the painting is authentic. If there’s a clash between the two, it’s bad art.
I’m not particularly interested in painting, per se. I’m interested in a painting that has that mysterious life to it. Anything that doesn’t partake of that magic is halfway dead – it returns to its physical elements, it’s just paint and canvas.
I still have agents in France, Los Angeles and Amsterdam who call and suggest parts. I’d love to keep on doing both painting and acting until the end of my days.
Painting is seen as picture making, the making of an art object, something that can stand on its own.
Sitting in the Oval Office, beneath a painting of George Washington, with a bust of Martin Luther King Jr. over his right shoulder and a bust of Abraham Lincoln over his left shoulder, Obama told ‘National Journal’ that the country’s economic woes are deep and endemic.
I liked English and art and did a lot of painting. And for some reason I was good at math, but I wasn’t an A student. I really had to work hard to get good grades.
Doing the show was like painting the George Washington Bridge. As soon as you finished one end, you started right in on the other.
Pollock also… wanted one to be wrapped in the painting.
I love painting so much that nothing else matters.
A painting probably is the most shocking increase in value, from what it costs to make to what you sell it for.
Ah, lives of men! When prosperous they glitter – Like a fair picture; when misfortune comes – A wet sponge at one blow has blurred the painting.
I was a student at Harvard, and that’s where I learned about so-called avant-garde music. Jackson Pollock, abstract expressionism and painting were well known at this time.
A painting that doesn’t shock isn’t worth painting.
The arts community is generally dominated by liberals because if you are concerned mainly with painting or sculpture, you don’t have time to study how the world works. And if you have no understanding of economics, strategy, history and politics, then naturally you would be a liberal.
You learn different things through fiction. Historians are always making a plot about how certain things came to happen. Whereas a novelist looks at tiny little things and builds up a sort of map, like a painting, so that you see the shapes of things.
And I think a painting has such a limited life anyway.
I feel fairly certain that my painting skills might not be best shown on ‘Dancing with the Stars.’ I’ll have to come up with another way to showcase that side of me.
You know, face painting in non-Western cultures is a sign of collectivism, is a sign of one representing the community, it’s not unique at all.
We share a huge visual memory bank, mostly through painting and other images in history. I think when a modern photograph taps into those, sometimes very subliminally, it makes people respond.
Sunday is the one day I keep reminding myself that I should lay around and take it easy, but because I am O.C.D. and an extreme multitasker, I find it hard to get lazy. I love Sundays for painting because it’s quieter; the gallery is closed, and there are no interruptions.
There was a point after the whole intensity of the Clash finally subsided when I just found that painting grounded me in a way that music didn’t.
Now why should the cinema follow the forms of theater and painting rather than the methodology of language, which allows wholly new concepts of ideas to arise from the combination of two concrete denotations of two concrete objects?
I don’t like painting flowers in my music. I like painting guts and pain.
Painting is a coalescing of experience.
I believe in the ethos of the remix, like Andy Warhol making a painting of a Campbell’s soup label.
My mom dressed me in silk to go to elementary school. In kindergarten, they sent me home because I couldn’t do finger painting in my dress.
In painting feathers, you want to create the look of feathers, but if you try to paint all the feathers, you have nothing but disaster.
All painting, beginning with Impressionism, is antiscientific, even Seurat. I was interested in introducing the precise and exact aspect of science, which hadn’t often been done, or at least hadn’t been talked about very much.
Every time I started painting it was like a new experience, but they all came out the same.
When I’m painting, I’m not aware of what I’m doing. It’s only after a get acquainted period that I see what I’ve been about. I’ve no fears about making changes for the painting has a life of its own.
If I was painting or writing, I wouldn’t veer away from things because they seemed unsavoury to me. So as an actor, I kind of think the same way. I should do things that are different and interesting and shed light on the craziness of the world.
I love Christmas tree bulbs, and I started putting them in my paintings. You’ve got to plug this painting in, and it’s got a rig in the back, so that each one can be replaced if it burns out.
The paintings are transferred from my computer to a disk, and I can hand it to the printer this way; or I can modem the painting to the printer over the phone lines from my house in Hawaii.
Without a good cultural policy, without adequate help, we will always have individualists, shooting stars who are rapidly forgotten or who stop painting for a more profitable occupation.
At the point where I’m trying to force something and it’s not happening, and I’m getting frustrated with, say, writing a poem, I can go and pick up the brushes and start painting. At the point where the painting seems to not be going anywhere, I go and pick up the guitar.
But, after all, the aim of art is to create space – space that is not compromised by decoration or illustration, space within which the subjects of painting can live.
The moment of creative impulse is what an artist gives you. You look at a Pollock, and it can’t give you the tools to do a painting like that yourself, but in doing the work, Pollock shares with you the moment of creative impulse that drove him to do that work.
Think of an abstract painting as very, very low relief – a thing, not a picture.
I always feel a bit trapped when a painting goes for millions of pounds and only one person can have it. If you can have that as well as a poster on every student’s wall, then you’re in a very enviable position. I’d like to do a Damien Hirst for £500 at some point.
Painting is something that you need to do, if not every day, then certainly most days. It is almost like being a pianist: if you stop, you lose something.
Intuition is the key to everything, in painting, filmmaking, business – everything. I think you could have an intellectual ability, but if you can sharpen your intuition, which they say is emotion and intellect joining together, then a knowingness occurs.
In drawing after drawing, pastel after pastel, painting after painting, the contours of Degas’s dancing figures become, at a certain point, darkly insistent, tangled and dusky. It may be around an elbow, a heel, an armpit, a calf muscle, the nape of a neck.
Wrestling needs to be about the art form again. It needs to be about painting a picture and having a really good match.
Painting what I experience, translating what I feel, is like a great liberation. But it is also work, self-examination, consciousness, criticism, struggle.
My popularity has to do with the divorce between modern art, where everything is obscure, and the viewer who often feels he needs a professor to tell them whether it’s good or not. I believe a painting has to talk directly to the viewer, with composition, color and design, without a professor to explain it.
The cafes bore me; going downstairs is a nuisance. Painting and sleeping – that’s all there is.
