Art is contemplation. It is the pleasure of the mind which searches into nature and which there divines the spirit of which nature herself is animated.
You know, one of the only times I ever wrote about art was the obituary of Warhol that I did for the Village Voice.
I just try to get away with as much as I can. I don't think that's very radical in the art world.
There must be some one quality without which a work of art cannot exist; possessing which, in the least degree, no work is altogether worthless.
It doesn't upset artists to find out that artists used lenses or mirrors or other aids, but it certainly does upset the art historians.
That's the great thing about art. Anybody can do it if you just believe. With practice, you can make great paintings.
I have to assume that everybody interprets a piece of art they're exposed to as if it's already perfect in its wholeness, without knowing any backstory.
In its most limited sense, modern, art would seem to concern itself only with the technical innovations of the period.
The trend in some of the contemporary movements in art, but by no means all, seems to deny this ideal and to me appears to lead to a purely decorative conception of painting.
You really need faith in yourself to make art and to stand up for what you believe in.
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.
Art is based on very clear, mathematical principles like proportion and harmony. At the same time, physicists need to be inventive, to have ideas, to have some fantasy.
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 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 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.
