Acting is secondary - I don't feel like it's going to stick around because it's not something I want to do forever. My art has always been my top priority and I have far more experience in that field than I do in film.
Back then, I didn't have a big organization around me. I was just a kid with a guitar, traveling around. My responsibility basically was to the art, and I had extra time on my hands. There is no extra time now. There isn't enough time.
People were more interested in the phenomena than the art itself. This, combined with the growing interest in collecting art as an investment and the resultant boom in the art market, made it a difficult time for a young artist to remain sincere with...
I like Betsy Ross as a model, too, the quilting bee, sitting around with your friends making art, asking what they think, so that you get the benefit of everyone's opinions and so it's not just about you in your you-dom.
I am only interested in painting the actual person, in doing a painting of them, not in using them to some ulterior end of art. For me, to use someone doing something not native to them would be wrong.
No, I never had any dreams. The process of art is a dream in itself. The artist just doesn't... you work out something. It's yours. You don't have to go to sleep to do that. You do that on the canvas.
I don't believe in the school of hard knocks, although I've had them. All that stuff about whatever doesn't kill you makes you stronger is so not true. Do you know what makes you stronger? When people treat you and your art with dignity.
In order to become a master, you need to emulate. If you're going to be as big as Warhol has become in art, then you have to have younger generations who are exploring your work and trying to understand it like a language.
I wasn't political enough to write articles about myself or go to cocktail parties, meaning that not only has my art been pirated and my intellectual property rights stolen, but my work has been misrepresented.
I wasn't an academic looking in books for ideas. But I educated myself about historical work that was similar to mine, to provide a frame of reference that wasn't the usual frame of reference of the New York art world and Europe.
I had a teacher in art school who said something about the only works he really enjoyed seeing or found much in were works where he had a sense that a discovery was made in the course of making this object. I like to hold to that as my marching order...
I think of other artists as generous when I get inspired by their work. That's why I like curating. You don't want to take someone else's art and have your way with it. You've got to be respectful of them.
All art is exorcism. I paint dreams and visions too; the dreams and visions of my time. Painting is the effort to produce order; order in yourself. There is much chaos in me, much chaos in our time.
I would never live in anything I design. Life and art are different. My life is very precious to me - my art is precious to me. I love designing things for other people, but I don't like designing things for myself.
I would wake up at night and think, 'What the hell have I gotten myself into? You don't want to do that!' But you gotta do something, and with art, there's freedom - which is actually very seldom practiced by artists.
I never had the exposure to techniques and so forth that children have today with art workshops, but I always had crayons and pencils and still have work going right back to when I was five or six years old.
I'm not really sure what social message my art carries, if any. And I don't really want it to carry one. I'm not interested in the subject matter to try to teach society anything, or to try to better our world in any way.
I am only limited by the amount of life I have left to capture the ideas I am already working on. Another problem is that I am not sure if I would rather create or collect art. Collecting art is another passion of mine.
I didn't want to save art - I respected the older artists too much to think art needed saving. But I knew it was finished, even though, at that time, I didn't know what I would do.
I began my career creating art for an animated feature film, and it has been a life-long dream to tell some of the story of my own life - the story behind my art - through the medium of motion pictures.
So at a time in which the media give the public everything it wants and desires, maybe art should adopt a much more aggressive attitude towards the public. I myself am very much inclined to take this position.
