Quotes by Michael C. Mcmillen - Page 1

I've always seen L.A. as a giant kind of laboratory for ideas in a caldron for concepts where you can try anything you want to and if it fizzles, so what, you try something else.
Michael C. Mcmillen / Sculptor
Kind
Laboratory
Trying
Copy Quote
I think we all have a tendency to have things. Even, I've noticed, people on the street collect things. So I think there's some kind of human impulse to collect. That's why they build museums, I guess.
Michael C. Mcmillen / Sculptor
Kind
People
Thinking
Copy Quote
I see myself as a very eclectic person and artist. I use all kinds of sources for the work as maybe some large pieces. Ideas come from all kinds of areas; literature, popular culture, dreams, you name it.
Michael C. Mcmillen / Sculptor
Dream
Artist
Culture
Copy Quote
I don't go to galleries every day because it's so rare that I like what I see. There's a lot of bad art out there and a lot of it is because art has found its way into the university, where it probably shouldn't be.
Michael C. Mcmillen / Sculptor
Copy Quote
Making art can be maddening at times and frustrating and not always rewarding, frequently not rewarding. But you do it because you believe in it and you do it as a passion that drives you, and it sustains you during those lean times.
Michael C. Mcmillen / Sculptor
Art
Believe
Passion
Copy Quote
One nice thing about L.A. is that you can work here in privacy, but that also works against you because you can get forgotten here, too. I think in New York, it's hard to be left alone. It's hard to have privacy whereas here, you can have it.
Michael C. Mcmillen / Sculptor
Nice
Privacy
Thinking
Copy Quote
One of the ongoing themes of my work of interest has been the idea of the inevitably of disintegration, of entropy, constant flux of matter, and so I've done a number of pieces that have explored those ideas. In the decline, there's a lot of beauty.
Michael C. Mcmillen / Sculptor
Done
Entropy
Interest
Copy Quote
I don't keep up with the art world. It's out there and if I did that too much, I wouldn't get my own work done. So I look at it every so often, "Oh, yeah, oh, okay," and go back to work. Life isn't that long. You got to do what you can when you have it.
Michael C. Mcmillen / Sculptor
Art
Done
Long
Copy Quote
As a kid, I wanted to be an inventor and realizing that being an artist is like being an inventor because you create problems for yourself and you solve them and you create things that weren't there before. That's awfully simplified, but that's how it is.
Michael C. Mcmillen / Sculptor
Kids
Artist
Problem
Copy Quote
A person who is driven to spend their time and energy doing something must believe in it, whether they want recognition for it, money from it, or if it's a cathartic experience to do it, whatever their motivation that is valid for them. That's the artist's motivator.
Michael C. Mcmillen / Sculptor
Believe
Energy
Motivation
Copy Quote
I like the idea of watching the sun go down in the ocean. I've always felt comfortable about that, I like sunsets. There's something about a westward movement that seems fascinating, although the Irish refer to going West as a metaphor for dying. I see it differently.
Michael C. Mcmillen / Sculptor
Ocean
Dying
Sunset
Copy Quote
I can't make things I don't feel passionately about. I've never been able to. Years ago when I was going through college, I was trying to earn some extra money by making motel paintings and it was the hardest work I've ever done in my life, psychically. It was just torture.
Michael C. Mcmillen / Sculptor
College
Done
Trying
Copy Quote
I love the idea of carrying on some kind of tradition using some of the artifacts from people that touched my life. They're a continuum, too. I still use my father's tools and some of my grandfather's tools. There's a very romantic streak in me. I confess, I'm a romantic, but I like the idea.
Michael C. Mcmillen / Sculptor
Kind
People
Tradition
Copy Quote
Being an artist is two things. You accumulate experience and time, and if you have something that's interesting, you have to be persistent. That's very important. There's nothing instant about it. It's a way of life, actually, where you choose to spend your life doing this activity called making art.
Michael C. Mcmillen / Sculptor
Art
Important
Interesting
Copy Quote
I don't refer to myself as a sculptor, but I use the word "visual artist." I prefer that, because that leaves the medium wide open because I've got ideas for film and video, things I haven't had the time yet to really fully explore, probably never will, but I want to be able to have that option open to kind of do that.
Michael C. Mcmillen / Sculptor
Artist
Film
Kind
Copy Quote
In a lot of ways, L.A. has always been kind of colonized or marginalized by New York. It still goes on to this day, but I would add that it really feeds New York because it provides artists for that system. This is really a laboratory where they grow the seeds and they go there and blossom because there's still not a lot of support in L.A. for artists.
Michael C. Mcmillen / Sculptor
Artist
Kind
Support
Copy Quote
I want to create objects that will stimulate the viewer in ways that I am stimulated by these objects. Now that's an ideal situation and the artist has no control over what his audience is going to think, but they can try to communicate some quality, some poetry through the work and just hope that the viewer has something in the vicinity of a similar experience.
Michael C. Mcmillen / Sculptor
Artist
Thinking
Trying
Copy Quote
I think good art has good concept behind it. Nothing can always articulate fully the way a Ph.D. candidate can articulate their thesis, because artists work with a combination of intuition and intellect blended together and out comes whatever they produce. So it's a blend of kind of a sensual response to material and an intellectual response to idea, maybe a blend of the two.
Michael C. Mcmillen / Sculptor
Art
Intellectual
Thinking
Copy Quote
I happen to like regionalism, whatever that means. I like the idea of art that somehow specifically reflects some aspect of a community or culture from which was created, the idea of uniform art sounds dreadfully boring and almost fascistic in its implication. So in that sense, I really celebrate the idea of a place that allows for a range of ideas and certainly L.A. does that.
Michael C. Mcmillen / Sculptor
Art
Community
Mean
Copy Quote
I think that to be a good artist, you have to have ideas as well as manual skills. It's a blend of the two, hopefully, and there are a lot of people there that can do things well, but they might not be devoid of good ideas or maybe they're not especially interesting ideas, or maybe there's a good idea that a person is unable to execute in the manner that does justice to the idea.
Michael C. Mcmillen / Sculptor
Artist
People
Thinking
Copy Quote
I think at one point, a whole new younger generation of critics come in and they're really aware of zeitgeist in their group, and the older artists tend to get forgotten as their critics retire and do other things or stop paying attention. So there's a factor of aging that I think is to be considered, too. As a middle-aged artist, you kind of get put on a shelf for the young ones.
Michael C. Mcmillen / Sculptor
Artist
Attention
Thinking
Copy Quote
A lot of the pieces I've done over the years have involved alterations of scale and the idea of the viewer's relationship to the object and how we see things by either enlarging or reducing objects, it causes the viewer to look at them again. It's hard to do because our culture is so bombarded by images and media. How do you make something fresh for a viewer? That's a real challenge.
Michael C. Mcmillen / Sculptor
Challenges
Culture
Real
Copy Quote
The idea of getting old and dying, falling apart, does not sound fun at all to me, but it's an observation that I'm sure I'm not the first one to express. There're thousands of year of history attest to the same thing. Maybe it's the way I'm personally dealing with that inevitable transition. So I'm making metaphors out of the work possibly to think about that and try to get comfortable with the idea.
Michael C. Mcmillen / Sculptor
Fall
Fun
Thinking
Copy Quote
For me, my work is pretty much a lot of my identity. I mean I live to work, basically. With money I'm able to earn I don't put into clothes especially or things like that. I use it as a way of buying time to work. That's how I see money for me. It represents time to be by myself working on these ideas. So in that sense, the work is kind of a surrogate religion, maybe not so surrogate, maybe it is part religion.
Michael C. Mcmillen / Sculptor
Identity
Kind
Mean
Copy Quote
I've always seen process of crafting as part of the thinking process. It really forms the gestation of the work. I'll get an idea; I want to express this idea, sometimes I'll start it, but during the process of making the object - if it's an object or a painting - it changes. It never goes in a linear progression from A to Zed. It's always this kind of circuitous, stumbling, groping in the dark kind of process of evolving.
Michael C. Mcmillen / Sculptor
Dark
Painting
Thinking
Copy Quote
L.A. as a geographical entity is very much a mixture of surf, desert, and the mountains, earthquakes and urban sprawl. Within an hour of driving, you can be out into the desert. I like that very much about living on the edge of a continent, conceptually is an interesting place to be. You're at this kind of juncture of a tectonic plate. The idea that the Pacific Ocean is right behind us, on a macro scale, is an interesting place to be.
Michael C. Mcmillen / Sculptor
Ocean
Interesting
Mountain
Copy Quote
L.A. has a lot of tackiness to it, but at the same time, in that funny kind of fantasy pretentiousness, it's unpretentious because it's all here. It's what you make of it. It's a land of opportunity in a lot of ways. It's a great for an immigrant because it is what you make of it, and especially artists as workers in this culture, it offers so much, in terms of variety, of diversity. For years, the alleys of Los Angeles were my art store.
Michael C. Mcmillen / Sculptor
Art
Opportunity
Diversity
Copy Quote
I always thought that art that is produced somehow has to reflect the zeitgeist or the ambiance and the time and the history in which it is produced. I think it's inescapable. It's like we look back now, at work done savoring the thirties, and you can almost tell it was done during that period of time. Now maybe, that's a style of period or something, I don't know. I think my work, or the things that interest me, come out of my reaction to history.
Michael C. Mcmillen / Sculptor
Art
Style
Thinking
Copy Quote
I love the idea of engaging the object, whether it be architecture or a piece of good graphic design, or a good painting, or piece of sculpture, or even a piece of industrial manufactured object. A piece of engineering can be quite beautiful, too, or a photomicrograph, or a cosmic photograph. We're physical beings and why deny that. So in that sense, it's very sensual to have an object that has the power to communicate some emotion or a state or give you some sense.
Michael C. Mcmillen / Sculptor
Design
Beautiful
Giving
Copy Quote
Art is a funny thing. It's a communicative medium. It really is, and it works outside of literature, the movies, stage, it has its own realm. It's like when you say "The Arts," those are all the arts, dance, theater, ballet. So within that set of areas of expression, we have visual art and it is visual and it's about looking at something and seeing it in the light with our eyes, maybe touching it or not touching it, or wanting to touch it, not being able to touch it.
Michael C. Mcmillen / Sculptor
Art
Eye
Work Out
Copy Quote
That's what I like about the idea of the aesthetic experience, the idea of both enjoying looking at works of art and how they kind of talk to you, and also the process of making art, getting back to that idea of the aesthetic experience of making art is very important, It's another way of thinking. Instead of just using your brain, you're using your hands to think with. They're different connections, the brain that comes through the fingertips as opposed that comes through the eyes and ears.
Michael C. Mcmillen / Sculptor
Art
Eye
Thinking
Copy Quote
One big disturbance, I think, between L.A. and New York is that New York is so condensed and together that it's very hard to be private there. There's a lot of constant interchange, people know what you're doing all the time. Here in L.A. it's the opposite, it's very spread out, unless you make a conscious effort to go someplace and look at something, you don't see it and we hear about it. So in that sense, it's a city where you can be very anonymous if you want to be, or even if you don't want to be.
Michael C. Mcmillen / Sculptor
Effort
People
Thinking
Copy Quote
You see a lot of interesting visual irony on movie sets all the time, you know duality, set illusions, the reality, all that stuff. You play with interesting materials that you couldn't afford to otherwise. You meet interesting people that you work with, have special machinists or mold makers and make-up people, and people who make prosthetic appliances for actress' faces. It's really interesting kind of witch's brew of people in that business, aside from the sleeze bags you hear about on the financial end.
Michael C. Mcmillen / Sculptor
Interesting
People
Reality
Copy Quote
A large part of California is a sensual state. It has a huge range of geographical features and in addition to the deserts and the mountains and the huge coast line. The fact that we don't have harsh seasons, like they have in the East, means you can have convertible cars. There's more sunshine, per year here, and it affects people psychologically and physically. I think California has always been an attractive place for many, a lot of strange cults have been here over the years. Again, it's an experimental place.
Michael C. Mcmillen / Sculptor
Mean
Sunshine
Thinking
Copy Quote
I've spent most of my life in L.A. and I'm still amazed at things that I don't know about the place. There are a lot of places I've never been to yet and I may never even make it. There's so much here and there's so much of a variety in terms of culture now. It's amazing. It's all here in one big city. In a lot of ways, the city is unique in the world because it's hard to find another city that has the diversity and range. It's a microcosmic planet, if you look at it that way. And in that sense, it's very much an experimental city.
Michael C. Mcmillen / Sculptor
Culture
Diversity
Unique
Copy Quote
We're living history all the time, in the papers, in the news, you think about stuff and it goes into your brain and you think about it and it comes out somehow. You have an idea; you've heard a phrase, or you're angry, or something disturbs you, or something seems paradoxical to you, you explore that idea, much like a writer would explore maybe an idea through metaphor. Maybe artists use their vehicle to explore ideas, so I think the things that interest me are the kind of idea of continuous change and how nothing stays the same and it's always disintegrating into something more.
Michael C. Mcmillen / Sculptor
Artist
Brain
Thinking
Copy Quote
I don't need to control the mind of my viewer. Now this might sound contradictory because I want to make these installations set up an environment that will produce a certain kind of experience in the viewer, but beyond a certain point, I take hands off and leave it up to chance and personal experience. So maybe it's a marriage of control and no control we're talking about where the artist produces the artifact or the environment and then walks away from it, and the second half of the equation is the viewer and their personal history and how they feel about what they're experiencing.
Michael C. Mcmillen / Sculptor
Chance
Artist
Mind
Copy Quote
The idea of flux, kind of constant change, whether it be our sense of time or geological time or cosmic time. It's always there, and I think that maybe it's a way of dealing with the idea of mortality, trying to acknowledge the fact that all things change, and whereas, maybe death is the end of one state of being it's the beginning of something else. I'm not talking about going to heaven or being reincarnated as a toad, I'm talking about the idea that the molecules in our bodies, or at least the atoms, were here at the beginning of the universe, and the sense that we are basically matter.
Michael C. Mcmillen / Sculptor
Heaven
Thinking
Trying
Copy Quote

Related Sculptor Authors

Yaacov Agam
Sculptor
Friday, May 11, 1928
Teresita Fernandez
Sculptor
Ruth Asawa
Sculptor
Sunday, Jan 24, 1926
Monday, Aug 05, 2013
Robert Gober
Sculptor
Sunday, Sep 12, 1954
Robert Engman
Sculptor
Richard Serra
Sculptor
Thursday, Nov 02, 1939
Niki De Saint Phalle
Sculptor
Wednesday, Oct 29, 1930
Tuesday, May 21, 2002
Naum Gabo
Sculptor
Tuesday, Aug 05, 1890
Tuesday, Aug 23, 1977
Michelangelo
Sculptor
Saturday, Mar 06, 1475
Tuesday, Feb 18, 1564
Michael Kenny
Sculptor
Michael C. Mcmillen
Sculptor
Magdalena Abakanowicz
Sculptor
Friday, Jun 20, 1930
Friday, Apr 21, 2017
Lorenzo Quinn
Sculptor
Saturday, May 07, 1966
Lee Kelly
Sculptor
John Chamberlain
Sculptor
Saturday, Apr 16, 1927
Wednesday, Dec 21, 2011

View All Sculptor Quotes

Top Authors

John Muir
Author
Saturday, Apr 21, 1838
Thursday, Dec 24, 1914
Jean De La Bruyere
Wednesday, Aug 16, 1645
Thursday, May 10, 1696
Ernest Hemingway
Author
Friday, Jul 21, 1899
Sunday, Jul 02, 1961
John C. Maxwell
Author
Thursday, Feb 20, 1947
Nelson Mandela
Former President Of South Africa
Thursday, Jul 18, 1918
Thursday, Dec 05, 2013
Napoleon Hill
Author
Friday, Oct 26, 1883
Sunday, Nov 08, 1970
Jordan Peterson
Psychologist
Niccolo Machiavelli
Historian
Monday, May 03, 1469
Tuesday, Jun 21, 1527
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Essayist
Wednesday, May 25, 1803
Thursday, Apr 27, 1882
Marcus Tullius Cicero
Philosopher
Napoleon Bonaparte
Military Commander
Tuesday, Aug 15, 1769
Saturday, May 05, 1821
Khalil Gibran
Poet
Saturday, Jan 06, 1883
Friday, Apr 10, 1931
Pope Francis
Thursday, Dec 17, 1936
Charles Spurgeon
Preacher
Thursday, Jun 19, 1834
Sunday, Jan 31, 1892
Martin Luther King, Jr.
Civil Rights Activist
Tuesday, Jan 15, 1929
Thursday, Apr 04, 1968

View All Authors

Michael C. Mcmillen Quotes - Page 1

App & Tools

Related Sculptor Authors

Popular Topic Tags

Top Authors

Share This Page

Stay Connected

App & Tools

Related Sculptor Authors

Popular Topic Tags

Top Authors

Share This Page