Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Drawing the kind of comics that I do takes so long that to specifically address something as transitory as a political matter in it would be about as effective as composing a symphony with hopes that it would depose a despot. On top of that, I personally don't think that my version of art is the best way to deal with political issues at all, or, more specifically, the place to make a point. Not that art can't, but it's the rare art that still creates something lasting if its main aim was purely to change a particular unfair social structure.
A painting is an object which has an emphatic frontal surface. On such a surface, I paint a black band which does not recede, a color band which does not obtrude, a white square or rectangle which does not move back or forth, to or fro, or up or down; there is also a painted white exterior frame band which is edged round the edge to the black. Every part is painted and contiguous to its neighbor; no part is above or below any other part. There is no hierarchy. There is no ambiguity. There is no illusion. There is no space or interval (time).
The magazine business is dying. It's a hard time for publishing. It does seem that everyone is much more opinionated now. I think there's probably more room for making opinionated illustrations. There was a time when Time magazine and Newsweek would have a realistic painted cover. A friend of mine used to do a lot of those paintings and he was told by the art director at one point, we are switching to photography. It seems that if someone saw a painting on a cover, it took a while to do, it must be old news. Photography became more immediate.
My grandfather was a member of Parliament for 40 years. Obviously we're talking here South Africa, a whites only parliament. I grew up in a family that was very involved with the legal battles against apartheid—the great treason trials in the 1950s and early '60s, and later with the legal resources center that my mother founded. My father was involved with a number of very prominent cases that had political aspects to them, whether it was the inquest into the Sharpeville Massacre, the death of Steve Biko, or one of the trials of Nelson Mandela.
Some people say, "Sometimes I have violent thoughts, what can I do?" So I say, "Well, have them!" Cos we should not try to control ourselves. It's very bad to control ourselves in this sense. If you have any emotion at all, if its a bad emotion or good emotion, think about it, you should just understand that you have those emotions. And it's good because we are people and we have all these emotions. And the result of that is you would become more and more peaceful. If you don't let those emotions be inside of you then you become extremely violent.
The people who run our cities dont understand graffiti because they think nothing has the right to exist unless it makes a profit... the people who truly deface our neighborhoods are the companies that scrawl giant slogans across buildings and buses trying to make us feel inadequate unless we buy their stuff.... any advertisement in public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours, it belongs to you ,, its yours to take, rearrange and re use.Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head.
When I look at a wildlife or nature subject, I dont see the feathers in the wings, I just count the wings. I see exciting shapes, color combinations, patterns, textures, fascinating behavior and endless possibilities for making interesting pictures. I regard the picture as an ecosystem in which all the elements are interrelated, interdependent, perfectly balanced, without trimming or unutilized parts; and herein lies the lure of the painting; in a world of chaos, the picture is one small rectangle in which the artist can create an ordered universe.
The material world is all feminine. The feminine engergy makes the non-manifest, manifest. So even men (are of the feminine energy). We have to relinquish our ideas of gender in the conventional sense. This has nothing to do with gender, it has to do with energy. So feminine energy is what creates and allows anything which is non-manifest, like an idea, to come into form, into being, to be born. All that we experience in the world around us, absolutely everything (is feminine energy). The only way that anything exists is through the feminine force.
Always remember, wherever you are, whether near or far, you had a mother who really, really loved you. The original mother. Once you've found your true inner guru you can never again be divided. Perfect union with the divine, through the grace of your real teacher, transcends time, space, death and all worldly limitations. Your real teacher is the original mother - regardless in which manifest or non-manifest form, or gender, she appears. The one who nurtures you and the one who also, out of wisdom and compassion, corrects you if you are misguided.
--Hero!? Forget it! We're Pirates! I love heroes but I don't wanna become one! Do you even know what it takes to be a Hero!? Lets say you have some meat okay? Now a Pirate would chomp down on that bad boy, but a hero would share it with everyone!! I want to eat meat!""--Hero!? Forget it! We're Pirates! I love heroes but I don't wanna become one! Do you even know what it takes to be a Hero!? Lets say you have some meat okay? Now a Pirate would chomp down on that bad boy, but a hero would share it with everyone!! I want to eat meat!" - Monkey D. Luffy
I was trying to develop a completely new, nonvoyeuristic approach to the female body as something other than a visual object. I wanted to find out what happened when you leave behind the voyeuristic mode and confront people with reality. But that's what was so interesting for me to discover: People don't want to see reality. It's a pretty simple idea, really, this question of how we deal with reality. When something is constructed, when it's projected onto a screen, it's acceptable, but it's different when it's there in front of you in a public space.
The female body has always been a construction. Even feminist art of the 1970s fashioned a body in accordance with its own ideas, and in this regard it was a form of manipulation too. Subsequently, we've had to engage with a lot of things that we used to disavow as manipulation. We can't just dismiss everything as manipulations anymore, since the alternatives are constructions, too. From our perspective, from this corner of the planet, we have to admit that it's all constructed. There is absolutely no nature. Nature is one of the biggest constructions.
The relationship I have with my mother now, and photographing her in front of the grave, it opens up discussions, and dealings with the conversations with my mother about, when I was little, how we lived and about suicide and talking about it, so it's something positive, it brought us more together, because people might never discuss that. Some families never go near certain subjects because it's too hurtful or too close or too dangerous. But within doing these photographs, I also wanted to open up a conversation with her about certain things about life.
As I get older I find myself thinking about stories more and more before I work so that by the time I eventually sit down to write them, I know more or less how it's going to look, start or feel. Once I do actually set pencil to paper, though, everything changes and I end up erasing, redrawing and rewriting more than I keep. Once a picture is on the page I think of about ten things that never would have occurred to me otherwise. Then when I think of the strip at other odd times during the day, it's a completely different thing than it was before I started.
I like poor materials. I couldn't see myself making a bronze sculpture - it's not me. I like neon, because it's moving constantly and like drawing. The chemicals going through the neon turns me on really - it's sexy. I like fabrics, but one of the main things with objects is that I really have to love them before I can use them. I have to have the object around me a long time. The little chairs I used in my last White Cube show are ones that my dad bought for me. A sort of a psychometry with objects and things. It's like the pieces I've made are my things.
When I look back on the past two decades of my journey today, I guess many people would interpret my artistic practice as a kind of cross-media attempt. I have indeed tried many different kinds of media over the past 20 years and collaborated in many different ways with people from many different fields. However, I like to understand this process as a kind of compensation for having once lost my "right of choice," an exercise of free choice and taking responsibility for any consequences that might result from it. To be honest, it's a bit of a paranoid act.
In 1916, when Johnny Heartfield and I invented photomontage in my studio at the south end of the town at five o'clock one May morning, we had no idea of the immense possibilities, or of the thorny but successful career, that awaited the new invention. On a piece of cardboard we pasted a mishmash of advertisements for hernia belts, student song books and dog food, labels from schnaps and wine bottles, and photographs from picture papers, cut up at will in such a way as to say, in pictures, what would have been banned by the censors if we had said it in words.
I have always sought to be understood and, while I was taken to task by critics or colleagues, I thought they were right, assuming I had not been clear enough to be understood. This assumption allowed me to work my whole life without hatred and even without bitterness toward criticism, regardless of its source. I counted solely on the clarity of expression of my work to gain my ends. Hatred, rancor, and the spirit of vengeance are useless baggage to the artist. His road is difficult enough for him to cleanse his soul of everything which could make it more so.
People see so many things in the paintings. Although I never think of them, it charms me a little bit that people actually project actual scenarios on to the paintings. Hopefully that means that they have a little bit of life to them. Figuring out the rhythm, the structural element has been the key thing in this work, more than the color element. It really was the variety of different widths that lead to a certain movement, a rhythm. Otherwise I'd fall into anything that was too stripy or almost like bar codes, and it thwarted the natural flow of the painting.
The great enemy of creativity is fear. When we're fearful, we freeze up - like a nine-year-old who won't draw pictures, for fear everybody will laugh. Creativity has a lot to do with a willingness to take risks. Think about how children play. They run around the playground, they trip, they fall, they get up and run some more. They believe everything will be all right. They feel capable; they let go. Good businesspeople behave in a similar way: they lose $15 million, gain $20 million, lose $30 million and earn it back. If that isn't playing, I don't know what is!
I lose faith every time I have to start a new page, and this is no joke. I've occasionally been criticized over the past couple of years for publicly "complaining" about how difficult drawing comics is, yet I've only mentioned it so that the younger cartoonists who are trying it out and finding it difficult and painful realize that they're not alone. There's not really any set way of learning how to do this, and it's always a struggle to improve, and, more importantly, see accurately whether or not one's work is communicating any shred of feeling or truth at all.
Until we can insert a USB into our ear and download our thoughts, drawing remains the best way of getting visual information on to the page. I draw as a collagist, juxtaposing images and styles of mark-making from many sources. The world I draw is the interior landscape of my own personal obsessions and of cultures I have absorbed and adapted, from Latvian folk art to Japanese screens. I lasso thoughts with a pen. I draw a stave church or someone from Hello! magazine not because I want to replicate how they look, but because of the meaning they bring to the work.
I think that all women are witches, in the sense that a witch is a magical being. And a wizard, which is a male version of a witch, is kind of revered, and people respect wizards. But a witch, my god, we have to burn them. It's the male chauvinistic society that we're living in for the longest time, 3,000 years or whatever. And so I just wanted to point out the fact that men and women are magical beings. We are very blessed that way, so I'm just bringing that out. Don't be scared of witches, because we are good witches, and you should appreciate our magical power.
I look at all of world mythology and folklore as my toy to play with. There are just so many characters and creatures there I want to put on paper. It's a really exciting thing for me to take material that I really love and put a new coat of paint on it and present it to this audience. And I don't have to make up any of the characters. I can just pull a book of mythology off the shelf and say, "I'll use this guy." I also hate making up names for fantasy characters. I'll just flip through these books and say, "Wow, this is way crazier than anything I could make up".
If you're going to be a visual artist, then there has to be something in the work that accounts for the possibility of the invisible, the opposite of the visual experience. That's why it's not like a table or a car or something. I think that that might even be hard for people because most of our visual experiences are of tables. It has no business being anything else but a table. But a painting or a sculpture really exists somewhere between itself, what it is, and what it is not-you know, the very thing. And how the artist engineers or manages that is the question.
Consider paint a film of light reflecting/absorbing material, and a colored paint a material which gives a particular, characteristic transmission of light via differential absorption and reflection. Call this reflected quality 'luminance' and measure it in millilamberts. This measure is as real and present as height, breadth, depth; and I find the phenomenon equally sumptuous and convincing. . . . Painted light, not color, not form, not perspective, or line, not image, or words, or equations, is painting. I make paintings which do not represent light, they are light.
Stories are a kind of thing, too. Stories and objects share something, a patina. I thought I had this clear, two years ago before I started, but I am no longer sure how this works. Perhaps a patina is a process of rubbing back so that the essential is revealed, the way that a striated stone tumbled in a river feels irreducible, the way that this netsuke of a fox has become little more than a memory of a nose and a tail. But it also seems additive, in the way that a piece of oak furniture gains over years and years of polishing, and the way the leaves of my medlar shine.
It seems to me that today, if the artist wishes to be serious - to cut out a little original niche for himself, or at least preserve his own innocence of personality - he must once more sink himself in solitude. There is too much talk and gossip; pictures are apparently made, like stock-market prices, by competition of people eager for profit; in order to do anything at all we need (so to speak) the wit and ideas of our neighbors as much as the businessmen need the funds of others to win on the market. All this traffic sharpens our intelligence and falsifies our judgment.
The more I drive myself into the depth of my inside, the more things come up to my vision, visibly or invisibly... I even do not know if I am seeing them with my eye or with my mind. I just need to copy them on my canvases. But this mental process is always overwhelming. I often have hard time to deal with my emotion on this state. You could call this depression on surface? But actually, so many 're-birth' and 'reform' are going on on my thoughts, inspiration, philosophy...etc in the underwater. I believe this struggle make my art real. My art always comes from my emotion.
It's not enough to have a few women's studies courses. Why is it more important to study Paul Revere's midnight ride than it is Susan B. Anthony's 50-year effort to transform the face of America for women? When you're in school, most of the events you study are about men. Men's activities lauded and repeated over and over. What about us? What about commemorating the decades-long struggle for suffrage? Why don't we hear those stories over and over and over again. It's almost inconceivable for men to understand what it would be like to live without that constant valorization.
During the Reagan eighties, the idea that money was a good thing - it was good to be rich; that wealth was a reflection of your character. We see this today in perceptions of Donald Trump: the idea that money is an expression of success and even goodness. I compare that with my dad's generation, where the American Dream was about giving your kids a better life, but not just in material terms. The American Dream was also about doing something good in the world. The home was at the center of the dream, but home also represented community, shelter, and stability for your family.
Why is it we love so fully what has washed up on the beaches of our hearts, those lost messages, lost friends, the daylight stars we never get to see? Bad luck never takes a vacation, my friend once wrote. It lies there among the broken shells and stones we collect, a story he would say begins with you, with me, a story that is forever lost among the backwaters of our lives, our endless fear of ourselves, and our endless need for hope, a story, perhaps an answer, a word suddenly on wing, the simple sound of a torn heart, or the unmistakable scent of the morning's fading moon.
I do a lot of pivoting. There was one cover I did of Donald Trump, after he won Iowa, it seemed like it was over for him at the beginning of the primary process. I was given the go-ahead on it right away. I drew it and he won the next primary, and suddenly, the cover didn't make any sense. And then, after the Democratic National Convention, it seemed like he was finished, Hillary Clinton seemed to be gaining strength, so the cover ran then. So it seemed like you can come up with an idea and it can be rendered useless two days later and then all of a sudden it's relevant again.
The object of your training in drawing should be to develop to the uttermost the observation of form and all that it signifies, and your powers of accurately portraying this on paper. Let painstaking accuracy be your aim for a long time. When your eye and hand have acquired the power of seeing and expressing on paper with some degree of accuracy what you see, you will find facility and quickness of execution will come of their own accord. Unflinching honesty must be observed in all your studies. It is only then that the ‘you’ in you will eventually find expression in your work.
The subject of contemporary art should include a political dimension, the distrust contemporary art has towards the existing order. One manifestation of this distrust is the mechanical dichotomization between art's form and its political content; the other is the institutionalizing tendency of anti-institutionalization. We almost never resist ourselves - the part of ourselves that has been institutionalized. We have occupied the word "resistance" and have become its owner, while "resistance" has become our servant. Thus, we own "resistance" and occupy it as a position of power.
I try to just put a blank stage in front of them, and say, "This is your space; you tell me where you're coming from and where you're going." At a certain point, it was interesting as the project started to become what it is now, The Source, which has a physical installation and also an online presence. As we started building the installation, I started thinking, "It's really strange that we're building this installation, this piece of architecture you can go into." It's almost strange because I suppose it's an artwork, but it's an artwork that's really constructed out of ideas.
One day a hummingbird flew in-- It fluttered against the window til I got it down where I could reach it with an open umbrella-- --When I had it in my hand it was so small I couldn't believe I had it--but I could feel the intense life--so intense and so tiny-- ...You were like the humming bird to me... And I am rather inclined to feel that you and I know the best part of one another without spending much time together-- --It is not that I fear the knowing-- It is that I am at this moment willing to let you be what you are to me--it is beautiful and pure and very intensely alive.
My overall approach toward art is to remain as open as possible in front of the world, to always be curious, not to be afraid to experiment, and have a sense of self-criticism and a general criticism toward the surrounding. Also, trying to make a difference between serious research and pure gag! And making as few compromises as possible toward doing things that might not be accepted by the majority of society, even if this dominant society is the one which is ruling the art world. To keep this fundamental idea, even if it's a bit trivial: to have the desire to transform the world.
Although I am even now still a layman in the area of mathematics, and although I lack theoretical knowledge, the mathematicians, and in particular the crystallographers, have had considerable influence on my work of the last twenty years. The laws of the phenomena around us--order, regularity, cyclical repetition, and renewals--have assumed greater and greater importance for me. The awareness of their presence gives me peace and provides me with support. I try in my prints to testify that we live in a beautiful and orderly world, and not in a formless chaos, as it sometimes seems.
History is a continuum, it's not these separate moments. That's how we look at it. In the 1700s in Virginia before there were police officers - there were these groups of men who would wander the countryside - and if they saw a black man or a black woman they would presume that that black man or woman was a slave. If you didn't have the kind of pass that you were supposed to have, then you could be whipped, you could be enslaved, you could be taken into custody - even if you were free. And as I'm reading this I find myself thinking, "How is this any different from stop-and-frisk?"
I've been playing piano my whole life but I'd never tried to understand how compositions are made really. Try to imagine if you'd loved paintings your whole life but had never painted one. My aspiration now is just to understand. I don't have professional pretensions. I've learned so much. So many things I've been doing in the visual, two-dimensional painting world parallel many of the inner working of music - how intervals resolve into each other, harmonic rhythm, tonal things - there's a whole vocabulary that overlaps. Sometimes people see pianos in my works - that I never think.
Storytelling is one of comics' esthetic hurdles at the moment, which was the novelist's problem 150 years ago: namely, to take comics from storytelling into that of "writing," the major distinction between the two to me being that the former gives one the facts, but the latter tries to recreate the sensation and complexities of life within the fluidity of consciousness and experience. As far as I'm concerned, that's really all I've been trying to do formally for the past decade or more with comics, and it's certainly time-consuming, since it has to be done with drawings, not words.
Luckily, my limited attention span is well suited to the velocity of the news cycles. There's an assault of stories coming at you on even a slow-ish news day, but certain things just tend to stick out. Certain stories just seem to have an odd sort of electricity. It does get tricky when you're pitching an image that won't hit the newsstands for another week. Not only can other, bigger stories break in the mean time, but other daily cartoonists, can also come up with the same idea - this is the most depressing thing - and put it out there so yours looks old by the time it's published.
Marcel Duchamp, one of this century's pioneers, moved his work through the retinal boundaries which had been established with Impressionism into a field where language, thought and vision act upon one another. There it changed form through a complex interplay of new mental and physical materials, heralding many of the technical, mental and visual details to be found in more recent art... He declared that he wanted to kill art ("for myself") but his persistent attempts to destroy frames of reference altered our thinking, established new units of thought, a "new thought for that object."
All changes in space which we see, hear, smell or taste are literally tactile impressions. All our senses are variations of our unique sense of touch. Two approaching objects touch one another when they finally meet without a noticeable space between them. ... This is what happens in any condensing matter in which the outer aspects move towards a centre... Each single part of matter approaches its neighboring part until the two collide, causing an impact or a pressure. It is space, which appears and disappears between and round object and in the movements of the particles of the object.
The art and architecture of the past that we know is that which remains. The best is that which remains where it was painted, placed or built. Most of the art of the past that could be moved was taken by conquerors. Almost all recent art is conquered as soon as it's made, since it's first shown for sale and once sold is exhibited as foreign in the alien museums. The public has no idea of art other than that it is something portable that can be bought. There is no constructive effort; there is no cooperative effort. This situation is primitive in relation to a few earlier and better times.
Day and night will not cease. Yet, you need not continue viewing them as opposites. There is no longer a need to think that night has the same power as day. There is just the power of light, with variations of intensity and interruption. Once the full scope of understanding is attained, duality fades away. Higher intelligence is manifested through integrated perceptions of wholeness which restore your recognition of the one spirit. The sons of God are those who do not explain life or manage it with dualistic concepts. The sons of God are those who seek to perceive wholeness in all things.
I'm a work horse. I like to work. I always did. I think that there is such a thing as energy, creation overflowing. And I always felt that I have this great energy and it was bound to sort of burst at the seams, so that my work automatically took its place with a mind like mine. I've never had a day when I didn't want to work. I've never had a day like that. And I knew that a day I took away from the work did not make me too happy. I just feel that I'm in tune with the right vibrations in the universe when I'm in the process of working. ... In my studio I'm as happy as a cow in her stall.
Thanks to our cinctures and corsets we have succeeded in making an artificial being out of woman. She is an anomaly, and Nature herself, obedient to the laws of heredity, aids us in complicating and enervating her. We carefully keep her in a state of nervous weakness and muscular inferiority, and in guarding her from fatigue, we take away from her possibilities of development. Thus modeled on a bizarre ideal of slenderness to which, strangely enough, we continue to adhere, our women have nothing in common with us, and this, perhaps, may not be without grave moral and social disadvantages.
There is something in such laws that takes the breath away. They are not discoveries or inventions of the human mind, but exist independently of us. In a moment of clarity, one can at most discover that they are there and take them into account. Long before there were people on the earth, crystals were already growing in the earth's crust. On one day or another, a human being first came across such a sparkling morsel of regularity lying on the ground or hit one with his stone tool and it broke off and fell at his feet, and he picked it up and regarded it in his open hand, and he was amazed.