I do not think men have more talent. There are a great many women in the arts; novelists, painters, sculptors, poets-but the proportion is far lower in the field of song writing.
Everyone gets a pencil as a kid, but it doesn’t make them all authors or painters or drawers or anything else.
At Sarah Lawrence, I realized that everybody was already what they were going to be. The painters were painting, the writers writing, the dancers dancing. And nobody wore any makeup. The art was uppermost.
I have tons of regrets, but I think that’s one of the reasons that push people to create things. Out of their angst, their regret, comes the best from artists, painters and writers.
I like the fact that in ancient Chinese art the great painters always included a deliberate flaw in their work: human creation is never perfect.
I love art, and it plays a huge role in my life. It’s definitely one of my greatest joys, and I’m a bit fanatical about certain painters and poets and musicians and sculptors.
I did a business in a box called College Pro Painters. They taught you how to paint houses, how to hire and fire, how to sell, how to deal with customers. You got a one-year franchise. It was the hardest year of my life in terms of hard work. I won manager of the year. It was very successful.
Painters were also attorneys, happy storytellers of anecdote, psychologists, botanists, zoologists, archaeologists, engineers, but there were no creative painters.
My friends tend to be writers. I think writers and painters are really all the same-we just sit in our rooms.
Even the Impressionists, the most innovative artists of their time, sought to paint realistically. They believed that their freer way of portraying the visible world was truer to life than the literal realism of the ‘salon painters’ who dominated French art throughout the 19th century.
When I’m dead, I wanna leave a body of work, like authors or great painters do. I don’t wanna get ideas above my station, but why shouldn’t this be comparable? Pop music was supposed to be a flash in the pan, but here we are 50 years later, and it means something to us, and it always will do. It’s incredibly important.
Artists – musicians, painters, writers, poets – always seem to have had the most accurate perception of what is really going on around them, not the official version or the popular perception of contemporary life.
Some painters transform the sun into a yellow spot, others transform a yellow spot into the sun.
Generally my focus has been on people who make things, whether it’s writers or directors or painters or musicians.
I always say Philadelphia, Pennsylvania is my biggest influence. But for painters, I like many, many painters, but I love Francis Bacon the most, and Edward Hopper.
Real painters understand with a brush in their hand.
There are, of course, always painters whom I admire and find fascinating. I’ve often thought, ‘Goodness, if I could paint like the Danish Golden Age painters, the early 19th century painters, the way they could paint a landscape – absolutely beautiful.’
Filmmakers are going to make films, just like painters are going to paint.
It is not the language of painters but the language of nature which one should listen to, the feeling for the things themselves, for reality is more important than the feeling for pictures.
Painters of paintings, writers of books, never could tell the half.
I paint German artists whom I admire. I paint their pictures, their work as painters, and their portraits too. But oddly enough, each of these portraits ends up as a picture of a woman with blonde hair. I myself have never been able to work out why this happens.
Writers need their totems, their altars. Mine, I feel, share the same randomness and utility of those belonging to painters I know, who are relentlessly visual and even poetic.
When I was about seven, one or two people encouraged me, and art became an enormous and important refuge. By adolescence, I was absolutely passionate about it and felt those paintings and those painters, whether they lived a few hundred years ago or were still alive, were somehow my companions.
In chess, computers show that what we call ‘strategy’ is reducible to tactics, ultimately. It only looks creative to us. They are still just glorified cash registers. This should make us feel uncomfortable, whether or not we think computers will ever be good composers of music or artistic painters.
Stories in which the destruction of society occurs are explorations of social fears and issues that filmmakers, novelists, playwrights, painters have been examining for a long time.
I make movies just as painters paint: I work where I can.
Modern art is what happens when painters stop looking at girls and persuade themselves that they have a better idea.
Writers and painters alike are in the business of consulting their own imaginations, and stimulating the imaginations of others. Together, and separately, they celebrate the absolute mystery of otherness.
Electronic musicians are quite like writers or painters. They are quite isolated in their home studios. We often don’t have that the opportunity to collaborate with that many people, like in rock or jazz.
David is purely a conceptual artist. He didn’t play any instruments or paint or anything. We were painters.
I like to move among painters, mathematicians, psychologists, people who can tell me something.
Breughel is an example of an artist – I mean, this is true about artists and painters in general, but he is a specific example of an artist whose work contains more than you think it does at first glance. Whose work rewards, sustains attention and looking.
All those crazy Impressionist painters in France were friends but they would write about how jealous and competitive they were. That’s what makes good art.
A thousand painters ought to be killed yearly. Say what you like: I’m every inch a painter.
Fashion photographers are the new painters.
A lot of painters listen to music, I think, while they paint. But I hate to do that. It’s a horror. I can’t really listen to the music. I’m not really concentrating on it, and I’m not really concentrating on the painting.
Some people are painters, and some are ballet dancers, and I’m a writer.
The craft of painting has virtually disappeared. There is hardly anyone left who really possesses it. For evidence one has only to look at the painters of this century.
It’s a marvellous life, a gregarious life that we’ve had. We’re very lucky in that way. Unlike writers or painters, we don’t sit down in front of a blank canvas and say, ‘How do I start? Where do I start?’
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