Michael C. McMillen Quotes

Quotes about:

• The idea of flux, kind of constant change, whether it be our sense of time or geological time or cosmic time. It's always there, and I think that maybe it's a way of dealing with the idea of mortality, trying to acknowledge the fact that all things change, and whereas, maybe death is the end of one state of being it's the beginning of something else. I'm not talking about going to heaven or being reincarnated as a toad, I'm talking about the idea that the molecules in our bodies, or at least the atoms, were here at the beginning of the universe, and the sense that we are basically matter.

  Michael C. McMillen

  Thinking, Heaven, Trying

  Source: www.aaa.si.edu

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• I see myself as a very eclectic person and artist. I use all kinds of sources for the work as maybe some large pieces. Ideas come from all kinds of areas; literature, popular culture, dreams, you name it.

  Michael C. McMillen

  Dream, Artist, Culture

  Source: www.aaa.si.edu

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• For me, my work is pretty much a lot of my identity. I mean I live to work, basically. With money I'm able to earn I don't put into clothes especially or things like that. I use it as a way of buying time to work. That's how I see money for me. It represents time to be by myself working on these ideas. So in that sense, the work is kind of a surrogate religion, maybe not so surrogate, maybe it is part religion.

  Michael C. McMillen

  Mean, Identity, Kind

  Source: www.aaa.si.edu

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• We're living history all the time, in the papers, in the news, you think about stuff and it goes into your brain and you think about it and it comes out somehow. You have an idea; you've heard a phrase, or you're angry, or something disturbs you, or something seems paradoxical to you, you explore that idea, much like a writer would explore maybe an idea through metaphor. Maybe artists use their vehicle to explore ideas, so I think the things that interest me are the kind of idea of continuous change and how nothing stays the same and it's always disintegrating into something more.

  Michael C. McMillen

  Artist, Thinking, Brain

  Source: www.aaa.si.edu

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• A large part of California is a sensual state. It has a huge range of geographical features and in addition to the deserts and the mountains and the huge coast line. The fact that we don't have harsh seasons, like they have in the East, means you can have convertible cars. There's more sunshine, per year here, and it affects people psychologically and physically. I think California has always been an attractive place for many, a lot of strange cults have been here over the years. Again, it's an experimental place.

  Michael C. McMillen

  Mean, Sunshine, Thinking

  Source: www.aaa.si.edu

  5 Copy quote

• As a kid, I wanted to be an inventor and realizing that being an artist is like being an inventor because you create problems for yourself and you solve them and you create things that weren't there before. That's awfully simplified, but that's how it is.

  Michael C. McMillen

  Kids, Artist, Problem

  Source: www.aaa.si.edu

  4 Copy quote

• I love the idea of engaging the object, whether it be architecture or a piece of good graphic design, or a good painting, or piece of sculpture, or even a piece of industrial manufactured object. A piece of engineering can be quite beautiful, too, or a photomicrograph, or a cosmic photograph. We're physical beings and why deny that. So in that sense, it's very sensual to have an object that has the power to communicate some emotion or a state or give you some sense.

  Michael C. McMillen

  Beautiful, Giving, Design

  Source: www.aaa.si.edu

  4 Copy quote

• Art is a funny thing. It's a communicative medium. It really is, and it works outside of literature, the movies, stage, it has its own realm. It's like when you say "The Arts," those are all the arts, dance, theater, ballet. So within that set of areas of expression, we have visual art and it is visual and it's about looking at something and seeing it in the light with our eyes, maybe touching it or not touching it, or wanting to touch it, not being able to touch it.

  Michael C. McMillen

  Art, Eye, Work Out

  Source: www.aaa.si.edu

  4 Copy quote

• I've spent most of my life in L.A. and I'm still amazed at things that I don't know about the place. There are a lot of places I've never been to yet and I may never even make it. There's so much here and there's so much of a variety in terms of culture now. It's amazing. It's all here in one big city. In a lot of ways, the city is unique in the world because it's hard to find another city that has the diversity and range. It's a microcosmic planet, if you look at it that way. And in that sense, it's very much an experimental city.

  Michael C. McMillen

  Unique, Diversity, Culture

  Source: www.aaa.si.edu

  4 Copy quote

• I always thought that art that is produced somehow has to reflect the zeitgeist or the ambiance and the time and the history in which it is produced. I think it's inescapable. It's like we look back now, at work done savoring the thirties, and you can almost tell it was done during that period of time. Now maybe, that's a style of period or something, I don't know. I think my work, or the things that interest me, come out of my reaction to history.

  Michael C. McMillen

  Art, Thinking, Style

  Source: www.aaa.si.edu

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• The idea of getting old and dying, falling apart, does not sound fun at all to me, but it's an observation that I'm sure I'm not the first one to express. There're thousands of year of history attest to the same thing. Maybe it's the way I'm personally dealing with that inevitable transition. So I'm making metaphors out of the work possibly to think about that and try to get comfortable with the idea.

  Michael C. McMillen

  Fun, Fall, Thinking

  Source: www.aaa.si.edu

  4 Copy quote

• That's what I like about the idea of the aesthetic experience, the idea of both enjoying looking at works of art and how they kind of talk to you, and also the process of making art, getting back to that idea of the aesthetic experience of making art is very important, It's another way of thinking. Instead of just using your brain, you're using your hands to think with. They're different connections, the brain that comes through the fingertips as opposed that comes through the eyes and ears.

  Michael C. McMillen

  Art, Eye, Thinking

  Source: www.aaa.si.edu

  4 Copy quote

• I've always seen process of crafting as part of the thinking process. It really forms the gestation of the work. I'll get an idea; I want to express this idea, sometimes I'll start it, but during the process of making the object - if it's an object or a painting - it changes. It never goes in a linear progression from A to Zed. It's always this kind of circuitous, stumbling, groping in the dark kind of process of evolving.

  Michael C. McMillen

  Dark, Thinking, Painting

  Source: www.aaa.si.edu

  5 Copy quote

• I think good art has good concept behind it. Nothing can always articulate fully the way a Ph.D. candidate can articulate their thesis, because artists work with a combination of intuition and intellect blended together and out comes whatever they produce. So it's a blend of kind of a sensual response to material and an intellectual response to idea, maybe a blend of the two.

  Michael C. McMillen

  Art, Thinking, Intellectual

  Source: www.aaa.si.edu

  4 Copy quote

• I think that to be a good artist, you have to have ideas as well as manual skills. It's a blend of the two, hopefully, and there are a lot of people there that can do things well, but they might not be devoid of good ideas or maybe they're not especially interesting ideas, or maybe there's a good idea that a person is unable to execute in the manner that does justice to the idea.

  Michael C. McMillen

  Artist, Thinking, People

  Source: www.aaa.si.edu

  4 Copy quote

• One of the ongoing themes of my work of interest has been the idea of the inevitably of disintegration, of entropy, constant flux of matter, and so I've done a number of pieces that have explored those ideas. In the decline, there's a lot of beauty.

  Michael C. McMillen

  Done, Interest, Entropy

  Source: www.aaa.si.edu

  4 Copy quote

• A lot of the pieces I've done over the years have involved alterations of scale and the idea of the viewer's relationship to the object and how we see things by either enlarging or reducing objects, it causes the viewer to look at them again. It's hard to do because our culture is so bombarded by images and media. How do you make something fresh for a viewer? That's a real challenge.

  Michael C. McMillen

  Real, Challenges, Culture

  Source: www.aaa.si.edu

  4 Copy quote

• I've always seen L.A. as a giant kind of laboratory for ideas in a caldron for concepts where you can try anything you want to and if it fizzles, so what, you try something else.

  Michael C. McMillen

  Trying, Kind, Laboratory

  Source: www.aaa.si.edu

  4 Copy quote

• L.A. has a lot of tackiness to it, but at the same time, in that funny kind of fantasy pretentiousness, it's unpretentious because it's all here. It's what you make of it. It's a land of opportunity in a lot of ways. It's a great for an immigrant because it is what you make of it, and especially artists as workers in this culture, it offers so much, in terms of variety, of diversity. For years, the alleys of Los Angeles were my art store.

  Michael C. McMillen

  Art, Opportunity, Diversity

  Source: www.aaa.si.edu

  4 Copy quote

• In a lot of ways, L.A. has always been kind of colonized or marginalized by New York. It still goes on to this day, but I would add that it really feeds New York because it provides artists for that system. This is really a laboratory where they grow the seeds and they go there and blossom because there's still not a lot of support in L.A. for artists.

  Michael C. McMillen

  Artist, Support, Kind

  Source: www.aaa.si.edu

  4 Copy quote

• One big disturbance, I think, between L.A. and New York is that New York is so condensed and together that it's very hard to be private there. There's a lot of constant interchange, people know what you're doing all the time. Here in L.A. it's the opposite, it's very spread out, unless you make a conscious effort to go someplace and look at something, you don't see it and we hear about it. So in that sense, it's a city where you can be very anonymous if you want to be, or even if you don't want to be.

  Michael C. McMillen

  Thinking, People, Effort

  Source: www.aaa.si.edu

  4 Copy quote

• I think at one point, a whole new younger generation of critics come in and they're really aware of zeitgeist in their group, and the older artists tend to get forgotten as their critics retire and do other things or stop paying attention. So there's a factor of aging that I think is to be considered, too. As a middle-aged artist, you kind of get put on a shelf for the young ones.

  Michael C. McMillen

  Artist, Thinking, Attention

  Source: www.aaa.si.edu

  4 Copy quote

• I don't go to galleries every day because it's so rare that I like what I see. There's a lot of bad art out there and a lot of it is because art has found its way into the university, where it probably shouldn't be.

  Michael C. McMillen

  Art

  Source: www.aaa.si.edu

  4 Copy quote

• I happen to like regionalism, whatever that means. I like the idea of art that somehow specifically reflects some aspect of a community or culture from which was created, the idea of uniform art sounds dreadfully boring and almost fascistic in its implication. So in that sense, I really celebrate the idea of a place that allows for a range of ideas and certainly L.A. does that.

  Michael C. McMillen

  Art, Mean, Community

  Source: www.aaa.si.edu

  4 Copy quote

• I like the idea of watching the sun go down in the ocean. I've always felt comfortable about that, I like sunsets. There's something about a westward movement that seems fascinating, although the Irish refer to going West as a metaphor for dying. I see it differently.

  Michael C. McMillen

  Ocean, Sunset, Dying

  Source: www.aaa.si.edu

  4 Copy quote

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