I could just hear my mom now, "You know those old candy cigarettes are bad for you. Next thing you know, you'll be drinking alcohol, and they'll find you dead in a ditch somewhere. I'll never be able to show my face in this town again.
In the beginning we start with roses. The king’s flower right? Only they wilt in less than a day, especially when exposed to the elements. But Carnations? Oh, what a beautiful flower. They come in every color. True, some are painted, but that doesn...
I could be listening to Painted Red weave the stories of the saints in her rich roomy voice, and beginning to see how all those stories were in some way one story: a simple story about being alive, and being a man; a story that, simple as it was, cou...
I needed to take her to a concert, or maybe invite her out to go stencil street art in the middle of the night. Except I hadn’t done that since middle school. And I’m not exactly Banksy with a can of spray paint.
The past is buried deep within the ground in Rabat, although the ancient walls in the old city are still standing, painted in electrifying variations of royal blue that make the winding roads look like streamlets or shallow ocean water.
When I was 18, I lived in Greenwich Village, New York, for nine months. At that time, I wanted to change the world, not through architecture, but through painting. I lived the artist's life, mingling with poets and writers, and working as a waiter. I...
Does art have a future? Performance genres like opera, theater, music and dance are thriving all over the world, but the visual arts have been in slow decline for nearly 40 years. No major figure of profound influence has emerged in painting or sculp...
When I was about seven, one or two people encouraged me, and art became an enormous and important refuge. By adolescence, I was absolutely passionate about it and felt those paintings and those painters, whether they lived a few hundred years ago or ...
How does an artist know when the line that he just painted is good or not good? That's the catch. De Kooning was the greatest of my contemporaries in art, and he knew when he'd done a good line. When he didn't, he threw it away. I wish I'd thrown awa...
Every song has a composer, every book has an author, every car has a maker, every painting has a painter, and every building has a builder. So it isn't irrational to take this simple logic a little further and say that nature must have had a Maker. I...
I am always alone, pretending to be someone else or lost in a vast emptiness. I miss life. I miss conversation and laughter and shared joy and hurt. I miss dancing and painting. I miss waking up to a day with no evil in it - at least, none that I can...
I will admit that we as young rebels always wanted fundamentalists to understand our take on their religion, but rarely, if ever, the other way around. The fundamentalists are the real artists. If you saw only a masterpiece of an original painting an...
And again, the dark street. The dark, dark street. The women out shopping for the evening meal of course, and baby carriage and the silver bicycle were already painted out by the darkness; most of the commuters too were already in place in their fili...
Not crazy in a 'let's paint the kitchen bright red!' sort of way. But crazy in a 'gas oven, toothpaste sandwich, I am God' sort of way. Gone were the days when she would stand on the deck lighting lemon-scented candles without then having to eat the ...
The author describes how impressed she was with the detailed storyboards that outlined her movie – "not just sketches, but real art". She then describes a Hawaiian sunset as, "God painting His storyboard on the sky".
We are paint streaked runners, deafened by the cries of all the sad people. It's a powerful sound that practically yanks the tears right out of you. Sometimes, you just can't help but feel like a very small clam in a very big ocean.
He remembered that in the art books he had leafed through at Leader's, many paintings depicted death. A severed head on a platter. A battle, and the ground strewn with bodies. Swords and spears and fire; and nails being pounded into the tender flesh ...
I did a finger painting today, and you can hardly even see my brushstrokes. Similarly, when we make love, you won’t even notice that I’m there.
Who can ever affirm, or deny that the houses which have sheltered us as children, or as adults, and our predecessors too, do not have embedded in their walls, one with the dust and cobwebs, one with the overlay of fresh wallpaper and paint, the impri...
Music. Close your eyes and it's a rosebush blooming in time lapse so that it shoots and blossoms flow outward in a swift choreography of growth and collapse, twine and coil, release and fade. Close your eyes and music paints light vines and calligrap...
I don't get it. Basketball is so supremely boring. I can't understand the point of watching ten giants running from one end of the field--court--to the other throwing an orange ball through a hoop in the air. I guess it's better than golf, but so is ...
