Motivation has always been a fascinating factor when considering a touring artist, especially when the years stack up. What keeps one out there year after year?
Wherever I wander off to, when I draw, when I paint, I get my life back. I am lucky that I am an Artist.
When a mad man found some certain way to express his insanity in original way, he would get promoted to be called an Artist.... Wait, are you talking about me?
I just would like to be challenged. I want to push myself to the limit, and constantly challenge myself and grow as an artist. That's where I want to go. Explore different things, different characters, in film, and just everything!
Once you have made the decision to do the film, once you have identified the desire and all the deep and personal, intimate, artistic reasons why you want to do the film, then it's more a matter of how to do things.
Liberty is the possibility of doubting, the possibility of making a mistake, the possibility of searching and experimenting, the possibility of saying No to any authority - literary, artistic, philosophic, religious, social and even political.
I don't think I'm an artist or that I'm doing anything superintellectual. What's important to me is to get a visceral reaction from people, for them to want that coat because they think it's beautiful.
There are a lot of artists in Gowanus, and certain things come into your visual vocabulary from living there - the scale of the subway and the canal, sometimes it almost looks like a de Chirico painting, with the intense angles of the shadows and eve...
I think Chicago people are very special people, and the Midwest's confluence of East Coast-meets-Midwest sensibilities had to, on a formative level, inform me as an artist and an actor. In that sense, it had to have helped me.
I'm an artist who works with pictures and words. Sometimes that stuff ends up in different kinds of sites and contexts which determine what it means and looks like.
The trouble with being a ghostwriter or artist is that you must remain rather anonymously without credit. If one wants the credit, one has to cease being a ghost and become a leader or innovator.
I guess I feel like it's a gift to meet those talented artists like George Lucas and Oliver Stone, Spike Lee and Richard Kelly. Even if it's a small role, it's a gift to be working that closely with them.
Communion was born out of shared frustration in 2006. We felt that although the likes of MySpace and YouTube opened up the playing field for songwriters online, people's discovery of these new artists was only skin deep.
I like rap. I like anything with soul. I like anything you can feel, anything that makes you think that the artist had to make that song, or they were going to go crazy.
They say your childhood influences your tastes and interests, or your approach if you're an artist. So what you create, whatever you saw, whatever your childhood was like - it influences how you're going to end up.
The thing that got me started on Twitter was just basically pressure from management and the record company saying, 'Hey, this is what all the other artists are doing. You need to be doing it also.' I didn't really have a clue what is was.
But in the old days, visual artists used to fall into two distinct categories: those of us who created images with cameras and those of us who applied stuff onto other stuff, with brushes or other tools.
I only get involved with roles that I find intriguing, in top quality productions regardless of the medium. I try not to focus on the format itself and concentrate instead, on finding roles that challenge and entertain me as an artist.
I think an artist, in my definition of that word, would not be someone who takes sides with the emperor against his powerless subjects. That's different from prescribing a way in which a writer should write.
Country radio certainly widens the boundaries of what I can do. Other artists may do something more edgy that gets on radio and that opens the door for me to be more edgy, I think.
I wanted to be the perfect artist. I'd do three hours of media interviews a day, going to every radio station I could squeeze in. I'd sign autographs after the show until everybody left.
