At Sarah Lawrence, I realized that everybody was already what they were going to be. The painters were painting, the writers writing, the dancers dancing. And nobody wore any makeup. The art was uppermost.
Indeed, an engineer designing a structure is not unlike an artist painting one. Both start with nothing but talent, experience, and inspiration. The fresh piece of paper on the drawing board is as blank as the newly stretched piece of canvas.
The key is in remaining just aloof enough from a painting so that you know when to stop.
Painting completed my life.
It is no use painting the foot of the tree white, the strength of the bark cries out from beneath the paint.
The way I create music is maybe like a painting, to compose in a more visual way. Basically it's the music that I want to hear- that's my inspiration and bottom line. I just try to get ideas from books, movies, paintings.
All my album artwork is body painting.
Milos said, You're my first choice. From my point of view, that doesn't pay the rent. I said, Tell me what I have to do next because I'm busy painting my kitchen.
Where painting is weakest, namely, in the expression of the highest moral and spiritual ideas, there music is sublimely strong.
When you make a painting, even abstract, there is always a sort of necessary filling-in.
When I first started painting, I had an interesting nightmare about Cleveland - I dreamed the houses there were encased in this free-floating cage structure. I guess Cleveland was a confining place for me, even though my parents weren't too conservative.
The thrill of a photo-realist painter is if you get really close to the painting, it looks just like a photograph. Whereas in my case, if you get close to my paintings, they totally fall apart - so I'm about as far from a photo-realist as it gets.
If the weather is good I go into the nearby wood - there I am painting a small beech forest (in the sun) with a few conifers mixed in. This takes until 8 'o clock.
The crucial discovery was made that, in order to become painting, the universe seen by the artist had to become a private one created by himself.
You're going to react to a painting in a way that the painting demands you react.
I believe that painting should come through the avenues of meditation rather than the canals of action.
I think when you work alone - the way I do it, anyway - you could sort of liken it to painting, where there's sort of a one-on-one with the canvas.
I wanted to make these people real, not like they were in a painting. Like these are people who don't know they're in a period movie. Those concerns are incredibly immediate.
When I'm painting the picture, I'm really painting a picture. I may have a flat-footed technique, or something like that, but still, to me, the thrill, or the meat of the thing, is the actual painting. I don't get any thrill out of laying it out.
I am a creative person. I like painting, singing, dancing, etc.
If I hadn't started painting, I would have raised chickens.
I have generally found that persons who had studied painting least were the best judges of it.
I always wanted to do something creative, but as much as I'm creative, it's in a really hard-core, right-brained way. For me, painting doesn't do it for me. There's no constraint.
My whole life has been singing and painting. I just do those two things.
Most days, I practice piano in the mornings and I spend the rest of the day painting.
Well, let's say we acknowledged the School of French Painting - the Paris School of painting as the leading force and vitality of the time. I think that was understood and felt and experienced.
If London is a watercolor, New York is an oil painting.
By painting colors and lines and forms seen in quickened mood I was seeking to make this mood vibrate as a phonograph does. This was the origin of the paintings in The Frieze of Life.
I'd been making music that was intended to be like painting, in the sense that it's environmental, without the customary narrative and episodic quality that music normally has. I called this 'ambient music.' But at the same time I was trying to make visual art become more like music, in that it changed the way that music changes.
I have never subscribed to the Dirty Pallet school of painting.
I tell my workshop students, 'I want you to think of yourselves as artists. Then, when you're writing, you're painting, you're crafting, you're making a design, you're sculpting, you're creating choreography, sound, a sound script.'
I no longer worry whether a painting is about something or not. I am only concerned with the expectation, from a flat surface, of an illusion.
The real sustains the same relation to the ideal that a stone does to a statue - or that paint does to a painting. Realism degrades and impoverishes.
I've certainly always had a very high regard for Botswana and so I paint a very good picture of the country and I've never pretended to be painting an entirely realistic picture.
The painting develops before my eyes, unfolding its surprises as it progresses. It is this which gives me the sense of complete liberty, and for this reason I am incapable of forming a plan or making a sketch beforehand.
I do remember when it occurred to me the first time, when I got the idea of painting the way I feel at a given moment. I was sitting in a chair and felt it pressing against me. I still have the drawings where I depicted the sensation of sitting.
