I have a Damien Hirst spot painting which I love. It has pride of place over my dining-room table.
My aim in painting has always been the most exact transcription possible of my most intimate impression of nature.
The small amount of people that control the discourse around painting - I thought that the whole museum world was just a bunch of phonies, and I didn't really want to have anything to do with it. I guess I did installations, in a funny way, because they couldn't be commodified.
All I'm doing is painting. It's my hobby. And that's that.
Good art in general aspires to something, as a good painting aspires to something, almost spiritual or holy.
I've enjoyed collecting. I've enjoyed art ever since - I'll tell you when - I went to Columbia. I went to the Met, and I saw Poussin's 'Rape of the Sabine Women', and it's this incredible, epic, great, great painting.
I hope to be painting more and travelling. Maybe fall in love. Have a dog one day. You know, all the good things.
We feel closer to the drawings on the walls of Chauvet than the painting of, say, an Egyptian mural. These artists are not remote ancestors; they are brothers. They saw like us; they drew like us. We wear essentially the same clothes against the cold.
My only worry is the painting I'm doing. Nothing else.
No other human being, no woman, no poem or music, book or painting can replace alcohol in its power to give man the illusion of real creation.
You cannot just be working in a vast, air-conditioned loft space and think you are going to make a decent painting. Francis Bacon had a special studio built, and he felt completely emasculated in there. I have to be somewhere comfortable.
There's this idea of bankers retiring and painting watercolours. You can't dabble in art - it's a life. Being a writer, an artist... is a whole life.
Movie making is not like other art forms, like painting, or writing a novel, because that can be digested or interpreted... It takes two years to make each one of these, and it's always judged on money.
I feel like I've done Pete Hornberger, and that is a painting I have signed, and I don't need to play that character anymore. So I'll get offers for panicky, pathetic guys, and while it's a great compliment to get them, I feel like I don't need to play that again.
The truth is that painting is all about scale; you use scale to create experience. A lot of artists have lost that ability. They don't even know that's something they should be doing.
For the general public, my work is sometimes easier than a painting because there is someone addressing you; it can actually be a relief. What's interesting is the idea of a tourist randomly coming in and the experience they'll have.
I haven't stopped painting or drawing - I've just added another medium.
In the end, the gesture of painting becomes almost meditative, like a ritual.
Painting was a problem - you produce a thing, and then you sell it and get money, and that was quickly considered totally uncool.
When I am in New York, you know, my studio is big, about 20,000 to 25,000 square feet, and I have painting rooms and rooms I do etching in, rooms I do lithographs.
Whenever I go on holiday, I like to time travel and imagine what it must have been like 500 years ago. I love the Tuscan landscape, which is reminiscent of a Claude Lorrain painting.
If you are someone like Jeff Koons, and you have to work out how to make a big chrome heart or something, then there are lots of people and a big production involved. The money is more natural somehow. For me, I am just on my own in the studio, trying to make things work. One thing is sure: it doesn't make painting any easier.
When I was living in New York, I had this slightly wannabe bohemian existence and took up painting, at which I'm appalling. I also bought several guitars.
If I had been around when Rubens was painting, I would have been revered as a fabulous model. Kate Moss? Well, she would have been the paintbrush.
My first artistic love was drawing and painting.
I started experimenting with jewelry in my 20s - I was playing around with gemstones and painting things in gold leaf, and it turned into this huge obsession for me, so I launched my first jewelry line, Jade Inc.
In retrospect, the pace of change in the arts and industry in the nineteenth century seems pretty glacial. Painting, music, the novel, architecture were all evolving, but at a pretty observable pace.
In the beginning, I started doing portraits of children, and of course, children have large eyes. For some reason, they just started getting bigger and bigger. Then, when I started painting imaginary children rather than real ones, they became bigger still.
The problem for the Left, however, is that the moment it stops painting the Right as vile, it has to argue the issues.
My hobbies away from horse racing would be reading and painting; I love art.
Arts education is a big part of building a 21st century creative mind, and I think that we have let way too many kids lose their way by not drawing in their young minds with music, dance, painting and the other various ways we can express those things we do not have words for.
As a kid, I wanted to be a sportscaster. On the radio. I loved the idea of painting a picture. I didn't want to be on TV. I wanted to be Jon Miller, who called all the Orioles games.
There isn't an amount of money you could offer me to do reality TV. I would rather get my job back on the building site. Or I could own a construction business. Maybe I could retire to my house in Long Island and take up painting, like Captain Beefheart. A crazy recluse: I like that idea.
No painting is ever not an infinitely reproducible image any more.
Egon Schiele is my favorite painter. There's just something about art - photography, painting, music, plays - whatever you see, sometimes there's a gut reaction that's more important or more visceral than what your brain is thinking about. You can't explain that reaction. It's like what happens when you fall in love.
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.
