Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Red is one of the strongest colors, it's blood, it has a power with the eye. That's why traffic lights are red I guess, and stop signs as well.... In fact I use red in all of my paintings.
I'm very interested in stopping time. And starting time. There is that aspect of time that I'm playing with, that it's elusive and unnoticed yet really in the end the most important thing.
I've always gone for a kind of perfection. In the end, it's so much better to get the feeling of, "Wow, she's so perfect," from a doll than to have to bear that from a woman in a magazine.
Art is free, but of course you have to be alert to catch it when it comes onto the canvas. I don’t choose the ideas, they choose me. I don’t wait for them. They come without my permission!
Making drawings with text in the first place, it really was born of a desire to be economic, and to do things as simply as possible, and to do as much as I could by the most economic means.
A lot of different things had to come together over the years, accumulated experiences of a general and personal nature, before the idea and the decision were developed and then carried out.
I believe in painting and I believe in eating too. What can we do? We have to eat, we have to paint, we have to live. Of course, there are different ways to survive. But it's my best option.
Sol LeWitt had a huge influence on my work because of his use of repetition and his clarity, setting up a system and letting that system go. That's kind of where the text paintings came from.
The most convincing artistic forms of our time are inner models of structural vitality and social relevance. They give us confidence that in spite of everything there is still quality to life.
I think we all go through times in our lives when we decide, "I'm going to try something else." I tried filmmaking instead of painting, and I think I enjoyed it more. So I don't paint anymore.
I don't think art is propaganda; it should be something that liberates the soul, provokes the imagination and encourages people to go further. It celebrates humanity instead of manipulating it.
I am proud to be able to exhibit my work and inspire young people. Especially young black women so they know that they are beautiful, that they don't have to hold onto any negative stereotypes.
[Love] can be found in making little dresses for stuffed birds, or in a garden of tenderness like I have done - mixing writing, photography, and real spaces. There are all kinds of acts of love.
I could be mistaken, but I believe the majority of artists are perverts, and that inspiration springs from the seat of perversity; that smooth stretch of consciousness between the balls and ass.
I did not go to art school thinking that I was an artist; I went there mainly doing stage sets for bands. I considered my work more as an applied art for musicians, not as art in and for itself.
As we get more transparent with data sets about infrastructure and systems management, I have a feeling we'll see big changes in how we think about complexity and our relationship to our actions.
I'm definitely not an outsider artist. I'm very much an insider artist. I get written about in art magazines, and I'm not, like, in a mental institution. I'm a regular guy who went to art school.
The Atlas belongs to the Lenbachhaus in Munich - it's long since ceased to belong to me. Occasionally I run across it somewhere, and I think it's interesting because it looks different each time.
I don't know what motivated the artist, which means that the paintings have an intrinsic quality. I think Goethe called it the 'essential dimension,' the thing that makes great works of art great.
I stopped painting because I was so shocked at what I was doing and how much I wasn't in the work. The work was alien to me. I didn't know how to paint in a way that would get me out of this funk.
After a few days [in Iceland] I tried to take a photograph. But with my attempt to distinguish the first shot, the place disappeared on me.... I hadn't been in Iceland long enough to simply be there.
There's something that happens with the collection of a large amount of data when it's dumped into an Excel spreadsheet or put into a pie chart. You run the risk of completely missing what it's about.
From the time I started taking photographs, I started working with plastics. I've always treated plastic like it was marble or gemstone or fine glass. I've always gotten the most out of it. I love it!
I studied at UC Santa Cruz before going on to do a grad program at UCLA. Santa Cruz was like an awesome hippie summer camp. I got to take a vacation from reality and hang out on beaches and in forests.
Without form, communication stops... without form, you have everybody burbling on to themselves, whenever and however, things that no one else can understand and - rightly - no one else is interested in.
I like posing with a guitar better than I can play the guitar, so I think I found the right field. But I've spent enough time with rock stars to tell you that the best thing in life to be is a rock star.
I can see today that the same sort of issues lie behind taxidermy and photography. Taxidermy consists in preserving a bird in full flight... In the same way, photography halts and freezes motion and life.
With regards to music, I don't want to pigeonhole myself and say I am a musician or a visual artist, because I feel like it's all-encompassing, and I feel like every bit of my art is related to the other.
Theory has nothing to do with a work of art. Pictures which are interpretable, and which contain a meaning, are bad pictures. A picture presents itself as the Unmanageable, the Illogical, the Meaningless.
In truth, factual information - names or dates - have never interested me much. Those things are like an alien language that can interfere with the language of the painting, or even prevent its emergence.
At some point I realized that the text was the painting and that everything else was extraneous. The painting became the act of writing a text on a canvas, but in all my work, text turns into abstraction.
I think one's art goes as far and as deep as one's love goes. I see no reason for painting but that. If I have anything to offer, it is my emotional contact with the place where I live and the people I do.
I have no motif, only motivation. I believe that motivation is the real thing, the natural thing, and that the motif is old-fashioned, even reactionary (as stupid as the question about the meaning of life)
Experience has proved that there is no difference between a so-called realist painting - of a landscape, for example - and an abstract painting. They both have more or less the same effect on the observer.
We've lost these qualities, these abilities to do something by hand. Some illustrators have it still, but it's just not art. We have photography. We have cameras and computers that do it better and faster.
The usual relationship between an artist and his painting is like the relationship with the father, or a husband's with his wife. But mine is a relationship with a stranger... with the chance acquaintance.
Not the victims of any specific ideology of the left or of the right, but of the ideological posture as such. This has to do with the everlasting human dilemma in general: to work for a revolution and fail.
In 1981, I think, for the Kunsthalle in Düsseldorf. Before that I designed a mirror room for Kasper König's Westkunst show, but it was never built. All that exists is the design - four mirrors for one room.
Black and white is so familiar. It's how we see the printed word in books, so it's kind of neutral in a way. Yet it's ironic that black and white is so charged socially, what with its association with race.
Children are the bearers of life in its simplest and most joyous form. Children are color-blind and still free of all the complications, greed, and hatred that will slowly be instilled in them through life.
When you are 'bad' in the art world they are very very scared! They want to control you... and they can't! Individuality and uniqueness are threats to the status quo. It is an artist's job to be an 'outlaw.
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.
My work has never been autobiographical. Although the subjects are driven on a personal perspective it's sort of elevated above me. I try to express something that is more a collective expression of crisis.
They say an elephant never forgets. Well, you are not an elephant. Take notes, constantly. Save interesting thoughts, quotations, films, technologies... the medium doesn't matter, so long as it inspires you.
I love to study the many things that grow below the corn stalks and bring them back to the studio to study the color. If one could only catch that true color of nature - the very thought of it drives me mad.
The reason these paintings are destined for New York is not because I am disappointed about a lack of German interest, but because MoMA asked me, and because I consider it to be the best museum in the world.
One Divine Moment In The Sweet Sanctuary Of this shade We heard the birds The leaves in the breeze And waves as they played And in one divine moment We felt our hearts melt Suddenly we knew How nature Prayed
My work speaks of the finite and the infinite, of the macroscopic and the microscopic, the internal and external, by the masculine and feminine powers, but sex is like a snake, it slithers through everything.
One can take a neon tube and simply paint it black on the front. So it would read as a black letter or a line, but it would also read as neon because there would be light coming from behind that black letter.
I didnt start doing graffiti until two years after I got to New York. Jean Michel Basquiat was one of my main inspirations for doing graffiti. For a year I didnt know who Jean Michel was, but I knew his work.