People find it very, very difficult to believe what I've done. Scientists have seen my work and they can't explain it. Even nano-scientists have seen it and been totally shocked. But if any man on Earth wants to challenge me, I'm ready. Bring it on.
What I like about the American woman is she usually has a lot of dynamism. In the U.S., women have a tendency to go forward, to be more exaggerated than in Europe. Many times the rough ideas come from the States, then they are refined in Europe. The ...
I'm trying to bring back 'Top of the Pops.' I don't know why us artists haven't just stood there and said, 'Let's back a campaign and bring it back,' because it would be the most amazing thing ever. 'X Factor' has got the Sunday show, and except for ...
I think people care. If not, why do so many people spend money going on vacations to see architecture? They go to the Parthenon, to Chartres, to the Sydney Opera House. They go to Bilbao... Something compels them, and yet we live surrounded by everyt...
Widespread state control over art and culture has left no room for freedom of expression in the country. For more than 60 years, anyone with a dissenting opinion has been suppressed. Chinese art is merely a product: it avoids any meaningful engagemen...
As a person, I was born to give out my opinions. By giving out my opinions, I realize who I am. As long as I can communicate, I'm not so lonely. If I cannot travel, or do art, or have company, if they take away all my belongings, it doesn't matter at...
When I was painting in art school - and I think many painters in the 1980s worked similarly - a finished painting would often be constructed from lots of other paintings underneath. Some of these individual layers of painting were better than others,...
For me, art is always a kind of theater. When I started the spot paintings, I made them as an endless series. But I was never serious about it being an endless series. It was just an implied endless series. The theater means you just have to make it ...
The big pay-off was to work as an artist and gain some shred of respect from your friends, who were also artists. But there was never any notion that you could make a living out of art. On the rare occasions you had a gallery show, and sold a little ...
No art is any good unless you can feel how it's put together. By and large it's the eye, the hand and if it's any good, you feel the body. Most of the best stuff seems to be a complete gesture, the totality of the artist's body; you can really lean o...
I was trying to make art that my son could look on in the future and would realize I was thinking about him very much during these times... that he can look and see my dad's thinking about me, but to also embed in these things something that is bigge...
I went to art school... but I worked at the Museum of Modern Art. I worked in fundraising at the information membership desk. I ended up, over a period of time, doubling the amount of membership revenue that came in through people entering the museum...
It's a great excuse and luxury, having a job and blaming it for your inability to do your own art. When you don't have to work, you are left with the horror of facing your own lack of imagination and your own emptiness. A devastating possibility when...
I always thought it would be a great thing to do an art carwash. So you can actually go and get your car washed, but while you're sitting around waiting you can walk in that hallway where you look at the cars going through the window, and that could ...
Growing up, I think I always had a sense of art: a sense that there was poetry in the world. I didn't know where I was going to find it. I didn't know where I was going to fit in, that was for sure. But I kept moving forward. There wasn't a future in...
When I am finishing a picture, I hold some God-made object up to it - a rock, a flower, the branch of a tree or my hand - as a final test. If the painting stands up beside a thing man cannot make, the painting is authentic. If there's a clash between...
In the West, we look at art through life. Well, that's one way of living. In the Orient they look at life through art. They even drink their tea without sugar, for the same reason that they don't like a lot of frilly decorations on a painting. I can'...
The No. 1 quote critics give me is, 'Thom, your work is irrelevant.' Now, that's a fascinating, fascinating comment. Yes, irrelevant to the little subculture, this microculture, of modern art. But here's the point: My art is relevant because it's rel...
A painter, who finds no satisfaction in mere representation, however artistic, in his longing to express his inner life, cannot but envy the ease with which music, the most non-material of the arts today, achieves this end. He naturally seeks to appl...
I was waiting for the longest time, she said. I thought you forgot. It is hard to forget, I said, when there is such an empty space when you are gone.
If what any artist has to say is fundamentally human and profound the public will ultimately take his work unto itself. But if his own conceptions are limited and narrow in their human meaning it seems likely that time will erase his work.
