I start listening to something, or I'm seeing somebody a lot or seeing their art. And then I just really want to make a picture of them.
But, after all, the aim of art is to create space - space that is not compromised by decoration or illustration, space within which the subjects of painting can live.
I want to make exalted art. A successful image has pictorial lift. I am looking for whatever is up there.
I don't like to say I have given my life to art. I prefer to say art has given me my life.
I don't like a lot of the stuff that goes on in the art world, but it's hard to be old and like what goes on around you.
I worked my way through art school as an auto mechanic, doing various stuff including sanding bodywork and using Bondo filler.
I've come to believe in the primacy of form - the notion of art seducing you through your senses, through your eyeballs.
The beautiful is in nature, and it is encountered under the most diverse forms of reality. Once it is found it belongs to art, or rather to the artist who discovers it.
I found I could say things with color and shapes that I couldn't say any other way - things I had no words for.
There are no rules. That is how art is born, how breakthroughs happen. Go against the rules or ignore the rules. That is what invention is about.
I like elegance. I like art nouveau; a stretched line or curve. These things are very much in the foreground of my work.
When the impulses which stir us to profound emotion are integrated with the medium of expression, every interview of the soul may become art. This is contingent upon mastery of the medium.
The art of pictorial creation is so complicated - it is so astronomical in its possibilities of relation and combination that it would take an act of super-human concentration to explain the final realization.
I don't really have a historical overview of my work at all. I'm not an art historian. I don't see that there's this period and that period.
Poor France, thy fine climate, rich vineyards, and the wishes of the learned avail nothing; thou art a destitute beggar, and not the powerful friend thou wert represented to me.
I was at the Royal Art School. That was a preparatory school specially for art teachers. You see, it was not so much for the development of artists. But we had there terribly stiff training.
I don't listen to what art critics say. I don't know anybody who needs a critic to find out what art is.
I could never figure out why photography and art had separate histories. So I decided to explore both.
Art to me is a humanitarian act and I believe that there is a responsibility that art should somehow be able to effect mankind, to make the word a better place.
Art has this ability to allow you to connect back through history in the same way that biology does. I'm always looking for source material.
I spend much more time looking at art history and at different references to art than I do at actual objects.
