Never let anyone define what you are capable of by using parameters that don’t apply to you.
A face is a road map of someone's life. Without any need to amplify that or draw attention to it, there's a great deal that's communicated about who this person is and what their life experiences have been.
While photography is the easiest medium in which to be competent, it is the hardest in which to develop an idiosyncratic personal vision.
You know, the way art history is taught, often there's nothing that tells you why the painting is great. The description of a lousy painting and the description of a great painting will very much sound the same.
Ease is the enemy of the artist. When things get too easy, you're in trouble.
I always thought that one of the reasons why a painter likes especially to have other painters look at his or her work is the shared experience of having pushed paint around.
Inspiration is highly overrated. If you sit around and wait for the clouds to part, it's not liable to ever happen. More often than not, work is salvation.
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.
Painting is the most magical of mediums. The transcendence is truly amazing to me every time I go to a museum and I see how somebody figured another way to rub colored dirt on a flat surface and make space where there is no space or make you think of a life experience.
Painting is the frozen evidence of a performance.
Sometimes I really want to paint somebody and I don't get a photograph that I want to work from.
You don't have to reinvent the wheel every day. Today you will do what you did yesterday, and tomorrow you will do what you did today. Eventually you will get somewhere.
I think I was driven to paint portraits to commit images of friends and family to memory. I have face blindness, and once a face is flattened out, I can remember it better.
The reason I don't like realist, photorealist, neorealist, or whatever, is that I am as interested in the artificial as I am in the real.
I'm not by nature a terribly intuitive person; I need to build a situation in which I will behave more intuitively, and that has really changed the life of my work - I found a way to trick myself into being intuitive.
In life you can be dealt a winning hand of cards and you can find a way to lose, and you can be dealt a losing hand and find a way to win. True in art and true in life: you pretty much make your own destiny. If you are by nature an optimistic person, which I am, that puts you in a better position to be lucky in life.
All the best ideas come out of the process; they come out of the work itself.
Painting is a lie. It's the most magic of all media, the most transcendent. It makes space where there is no space.
Like any corporation, I have the benefit of the brainpower of everyone who is working for me. It all ends up being my work, the corporate me, but everyone extends ideas and comes up with suggestions.
See, I think our whole society is much too problem-solving oriented. It is far more interesting to participate in 'problem creation'... You know, ask yourself an interesting enough question and your attempt to find a tailor-made solution to that question will push you to a place where, pretty soon, you'll find yourself all by your lonesome - which I think is a more interesting place to be.
I discovered about 150 dots is the minimum number of dots to make a specific recognizable person. You can make something that looks like a head, with fewer dots, but you won't be able to give much information about who it is.
If the bottom dropped out of the market and the artist was not going to sell anything, he or she will keep working, and the dealer will keep trying to find some way to convince somebody to buy this stuff.
If it looks like art, chances are it's somebody else's art.
I can't always reach the image in my mind... almost never, in fact... so that the abstract image I create is not quite there, but it gets to the point where I can leave it.
I am going for a level of perfection that is only mine... Most of the pleasure is in getting the last little piece perfect.
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