When you're buying paintings, it feels grown up.
I had a major bug for cities and for paintings and literature and all the things I thought went on in cities.
Not only are most of our citizens fathomlessly ignorant of the glories of American literature, a fast-growing percentage of our students are no longer taught much about any works of American art, be they novels, paintings, symphonies or ballets.
Art historians agree that Da Vinci's paintings contain hidden levels of meaning that go well beneath the surface of the paint. Many scholars believe his work intentionally provides clues to a powerful secret... a secret that remains protected to this day by a clandestine brotherhood of which Da Vinci was a member.
The way I paint is similar to rock in that you don't stand around and say, 'Gee, what are they talking about?' Rock is simple, blunt, colorful. Same with my paintings. You don't stand back and wonder what it is. That's Jim Morrison, that's a panda, that's a scene on the West Coast. It's not abstract.
I love meeting people who've read my books. The prime reason to be on the planet is to make things I can show to other people: paintings, books, movies.
I get strength from my art - all the paintings I own are powerful.
I think that has been a benefit to me because I think most people understand quilts and not a lot of people understand paintings. But yet they're looking at one.
Characters I've played, they used to impact my paintings, like 80 percent of the time, and especially when I was doing an action film.
Essentially, all expressions of human nature ever produced, from a caveman's paintings to Mozart's symphonies and Einstein's view of the universe, emerge from the same source: the relentless dynamic toil of large populations of interconnected neurons.
I'll bet there are a lot of artists that nobody hears about who just make more money than anybody. The people that do all the sculptures and paintings for big building construction. We never hear about them, but they make more money than anybody.
My paintings are very strange - large and empty, like walls. Just the opposite of my writing, which is rich and juicy.
How are we going to make painters by lecturing to them? We are going to make questioners, doubters, and talkers. We are going to make painters by painting ourselves, and by showing the paintings of others. By working frankly from our convictions, we are going to make them work frankly from theirs.
I like the transience of Klimt paintings.
I also take pleasure in the so-called negative power in Grotjahn's work. That is, I love his paintings for what they are not. Unlike much art of the past decade, Grotjahn isn't simply working from a prescribed checklist of academically acceptable, curator-approved 'isms' and twists.
I'd never painted anything before. I was quite content to take other people's work since I didn't care anyway about the subject matter. I approached subject matter as a scoundrel. I had nothing to say about it whatsoever. I only wanted to make these exciting paintings.
Even the earliest cave paintings in France and Spain had natural motion.
There have been many, many paintings of Theseus and the Minotaur, as it is one of the more popular myths, so how could I make mine different and new? I decided it would be best to make the most dynamic painting I could. I wanted to capture the moment right before the Minotaur's horn was snapped.
The paintings to me are always canvas; sculpture has always been metal, though I have made sculpture in wood, also.
In my 20s, when I was a photojournalist in Beijing. I joined an underground art group and put on clandestine exhibitions of my paintings.
The only thing I can say is consistent in all my paintings is vivid color.
Really, I do not know whether my paintings are surrealist or not, but I do know that they are the frankest expression of myself.
I grew up with the idea of the cyborg and the robot, but at the same time I felt this intense disconnection between the things I was engaged with and inspired by in terms of fun and play. It seemed like paintings and drawings were so static.
I have friends come over and we read plays out loud and I make paintings and I just do things all the time just so I don't ever feel like I'm sitting around.
I began observing, making paintings of my surroundings, taking a vow of silence, listening, composing music, writing, and making time for formal education. Then I started telling stories.
I love Christmas tree bulbs, and I started putting them in my paintings. You've got to plug this painting in, and it's got a rig in the back, so that each one can be replaced if it burns out.
I am not really into paintings, to be honest, but for me, the art I love is when I see singers putting their heart into their song, actors giving the performance of their lives, and books and movies that make me feel something I never thought I could; there's art in everything as long as it's made with soul.
Sometimes people damage paintings or sculpture because they love it. They throw their arms around a statue in a fit of hysterical passion and it falls over.
Ironically, my paintings don't photograph well.
I was raised in South Carolina; I wasn't aware of any art in South Carolina. There was a minor museum in Charleston, which had nothing of interest in it. It showed local artists, paintings of birds.
Most people respond to my paintings quite generously, but there have been cases where I think people - a few critics in particular - were actually moved by the work but were disturbed by the feelings it evoked, so they attacked it. Some people find the realm of my work quite uncomfortable.
Writing plays supplied for me everything that painting didn't, which is the ability to tell stories in real time, in a real space, in three dimensions, in flesh and blood. I realized I had been trying to cram all this narrative into my paintings, but ultimately painting was a static medium. So it just opened up this whole new door.
If someone stands in front of one of my paintings and says, 'This is just a mess', the word 'just' is not so good, but 'mess' might be right. Why not a mess? If it makes you say, 'Wow, I've never seen anything like that', that's beautiful.
Not all paintings are abstract; they're not all Jackson Pollock. There's value in a photograph of a man alone on a boat at sea, and there is value in painting of a man alone on a boat at sea. In the painting, the painting has more freedom to express an idea, more latitude in being able to elicit certain emotion.
I really had no program or any established plan. I didn't even ask myself if I should sell my paintings or not.
My paintings are certainly nonobjective. They're just horizontal lines.