I wrote as a kid, but I never wanted to be a writer, particularly. I had been drawing and painting for years and loved that.
I can tell really early on in a painting if I’m going to toss it or not.
I still take photographs for my own use, personal studies. I do not feel that I can fully express my views through the medium and this is why I have moved towards painting.
Do activities you’re passionate about – which make your heart and soul feel perky – including things like working out, cooking, painting, writing, yoga, hiking, walking, swimming, being in nature, being around art, or reading inspiring books.
I think when somebody’s painting they don’t necessarily… I’m not illustrating what I know. I’m mapping out, like topographically, some terrain I am satisfied with, how awkward that mark is.
I hate painting with a broad brush, but I think the birther thing, at its root, is racist. The guy was born in Hawaii. A black guy is president. It’s cool. Get over it. Just deal with it. There’s nothing you could show these birther people that would shut them up.
I tried painting for a short time and realized that I was not a child prodigy at painting.
For most Americans, poetry plays no role in their everyday lives. But also for most Americans, contemporary painting or jazz or sculpture play no role either. I’m not saying poetry is singled out as a special thing to ignore.
I seldom have my stuff up unless I’m testing it. If I’m worrying about a painting, I put it up and see if I detest it quickly or slowly. Otherwise I have things by other artists.
I’m very superstitious. I come from a family that’s big on not painting the nursery until the baby is home.
The key is in remaining just aloof enough from a painting so that you know when to stop.
I will give a proof to demonstrate with facts that there are no rules in painting and that oppression or servile obligation of making all study or follow the same path is a great impediment for the young who profess this very difficult art.
I started formal piano training when I was 4. From there I had little violas, and I had dancing lessons of every sort and description, and painting lessons. I had German. And shorthand.
I am only interested in painting the actual person, in doing a painting of them, not in using them to some ulterior end of art. For me, to use someone doing something not native to them would be wrong.
Leon Theremin’s original designs are elegant, ingenious and effective. As electronics goes, the theremin is very simple. But there are so many subtleties hidden in the details of the design. It’s like a great sonnet, or a painting, or a speech, that is perfectly done on more than one level.
But when I worked on a painting I would do it from a drawing but I would put certain things I was fairly sure I wanted in the painting, and then collage on the painting with printed dots or painted paper or something before I really committed it.
Easel painting means small painting.
Any artist, the work you do, if it’s a painting or if it’s a performance, you hope it translates to a common denominator with the people that they see something in their own life in there. Or they see something in somebody else’s life. That’s what’s fun about sharing art.
When I first started painting candyland imagery, I was looking for the best possible metaphor for everything that is pleasure, desire and insatiability.
One must act in painting as in life, directly.
The ’20s ended in an era of extravagance, sort of like the one we’re in now. There was a big crash, but then the country picked itself up again, and we had some great years. Those were the days when American believed in itself. I was happy and proud to be painting it.
Painting is a lie. It’s the most magic of all media, the most transcendent. It makes space where there is no space.
In the early ’60s, it was still a fairly subversive thing, though, to say that you should take a painting, cut it, set it on fire, step on it, hammer nails into it.
As a kid, I wanted to be a sportscaster. On the radio. I loved the idea of painting a picture. I didn’t want to be on TV. I wanted to be Jon Miller, who called all the Orioles games.
I love painting and have a need to do it.
Punk rock and skateboarding took the ‘school’ out of living your life, and I related to learning as I went, doing a lot of different things that I liked, when I liked. Consequently, I’m mediocre at all of the above, but still stoked on being a lifetime student of music, skating, painting, writing, etc.
A painting is finished when the subject comes back, when what has caused the painting to be made comes back as an object.
The final test of a painting, theirs, mine, any other, is: does the painter’s emotions come across?
I use printers to make prints of the images that I am creating. And I try to have that surface kind of replicated in the painting.
A portrait is a painting with something wrong with the mouth.
Painting (like poetry) chooses from universals what is most apposite. It brings together, in a single imaginary being, circumstances and characteristics which occur in nature in many different persons.
People look at film in a gallery, and if they walk out after two minutes they know they haven’t seen the whole work. But then people look at a painting for two minutes and think they’ve seen it. Certain paintings are made to be consumed fast. But some require a slowed-down time. You have to go back to them.
It was a huge challenge to learn digital painting well enough so that computers don’t pop into mind when one sees one.
I didn’t do so well in the academic world, so I think the only way I could express myself was through visual art – anything I could get my hands on, whether it was glassblowing, sculpture, painting, or photography. I always wanted to be a painter. Or a farmer.
My mom and dad divorced when I was 8 years old, but my Dad never left my life. We would go over there on weekends and he’d be playing his guitar, listening to Bobby Blue Bland and B. B. King and KBLX radio while he was out in the garage painting custom cars.
Painting was a problem – you produce a thing, and then you sell it and get money, and that was quickly considered totally uncool.
I was worried in the ’80s that the best abstract painting had become obsessed with materiality, and painterly gestures and materiality were up against the wall.
I never consciously said, ‘I want to be an actor.’ It sounds stupid, but it’s kind of like being a painter or something. You don’t say, ‘From today on I’m going to be a painter.’ It’s not something conscious – you’ve just been painting pictures all your life.
Painting, I think it’s like jazz.
Most artists never get a chance to be Picasso, but that doesn’t mean you would stop painting.
Last year my boyfriend gave me a painting – a very personal one. I really prefer personal gifts or ones made by someone for me. Except diamonds. That’s the exception to the rule.
I love film – it’s like painting.
It is only when I lose contact with the painting that the result is a mess. Otherwise there is pure harmony, an easy give and take, and the painting comes out well.
I wanted to study at the Art Students League in New York when I was young, but I didn’t have the money. Then I was fortunate enough to become Johnny Cougar Mellencamp. At the time, I thought I’d make a couple of records and get back to painting. It never dawned on me that I’d be 64 years old and still making music.
I have never subscribed to the Dirty Pallet school of painting.
‘State’ can be a word that is a noun or a verb or an adverb – it’s kind of why I chose that title. It’s not to confound the audience but to keep me from painting myself into a cul-de-sac in the early stages of making a record by having too high concept or having some really strict set of rules I have to adhere to.
If I hadn’t started painting, I would have raised chickens.
Painting pictures didn’t make me a lot of money. I have to eat.
When I am in my painting, I’m not aware of what I’m doing.
I don’t believe in making pencil sketches and then painting landscape in your studio. You must be right under the sky.
I became an American on Nov. 4, 2010, at an elegant ceremony in Great Hall of Bullfinch’s Faneuil Hall, Boston, beneath a vast painting of Daniel Webster debating the preservation of the Union with Robert Hayne of South Carolina, before the Civil War.
I graduated from college with a 3.92 GPA with a degree in computer programming and a BFA in fine arts and animation. My first job was painting a mural in the Grimaldi’s in Queens.
I have to go with what the painting says to me. The painting is always informing me. I’m its servant; it’s not mine. I’m doing what it wants.
Landscape is to American painting what sex and psychoanalysis are to the American novel.
The problem for the Left, however, is that the moment it stops painting the Right as vile, it has to argue the issues.
Before adolescence I had an incredible voice. Like when I was 12, 13, 14 – I was taking acting classes, I was painting, I was making music, I was taking photographs. I was kind of exploding creatively, and then something about adolescence really just ground that out of me.
I came down successfully through Picasso and Braque, down through Pollock, I guess, but I began to stop at Franz Kline and the Abstractionists. I like their design, brilliant design, marvelous color layers. But I don’t find any human content there. I’m from an old school, and painting has to have human content for me.
