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Quotes by Artist

"A new gadget that lasts only five minutes is worth more than an immortal work that bores everyone."


"Know what the old masters did. Know how they composed their pictures, but do not fall into the conventions they established. These conventions were right for them, and they are wonderful. They made their language. You make yours. All the past can help you."

"I thought that it would be easier to learn that if I worked in motion pictures. So I went to work with one motion picture producer who was developing a color system. This didn't do to me much good. All I did was pick filters for the camera."

"I have been to several wars to draw. I went to Vietnam. And made drawings in Vietnam during that period of the war there, and found that to be a very very sad situation."


"My interest in desperation lies only in that sometimes I find myself having become desperate. Very seldom do I start out that way. I can see of course that, in the abstract, thinking and all activity is rather desperate."

"Most people are good at too many things. And when you say someone is focused, more often than not what you actually mean is they're very narrow."

"I think that one's art is a growth inside one. I do not think one can explain growth. It is silent and subtle. One does not keep digging up a plant to see how it grows."

"Hold me in your arms, lava lamp! Let me seek magma comfort and peace in the warmth of your kryptonite embrace."

"I have walked around the same streets so many times, and then seen a place that had been hidden to me. I now know the sites in a way that makes me think I could have made better use of the connections between place and snowball."
Now,

"Schools are really bad now. Schools are not only bad in reading, writing and arithmetic, they're worse in cultural aspects, like in music and art. They don't teach you anything."


"I dream a lot. I do more painting when I'm not painting. It's in the subconscious."

"My mother is a very strange woman... She doesn't understand me in the least and doesn't love me much either. If she had either love or understanding she would be prepared to make sacrifices."


"To worship the product and ignore its development leads to dilettantism and reaction."

"Internet mailing lists are like Fox television shows. They have really cool previews, and they get you all excited about them, but they just don't live up to their promises."


"Minimalism wasn't a real idea - it ended before it started."

"Only those who attempt the absurd will achieve the impossible. I think it's in my basement... let me go upstairs and check."
Will,


"Here, on the river's verge, I could be busy for months without changing my place, simply leaning a little more to right or left."

"It is not so for art in appreciation because art is concerned with human behavior. And science is concerned with the behavior of metal or energy. It depends on what the fashion is. Now today it's energy. It's the same soul behind it. The same soul, you see."

"From 20 years of experience hiring artists out of the schools, I know-they get worse every year. They're absolutely ridiculously retarded now."

"If most American cities are about the consumption of culture, Los Angeles and New York are about the production of culture - not only national culture but global culture."

"I try to construct a picture in which shapes, spaces, colors, form a set of unique relationships, independent of any subject matter. At the same time I try to capture and translate the excitement and emotion aroused in me by the impact with the original idea."

"A pioneer destroys things and calls it civilization."

"In visual perception a color is almost never seen as it really is - as it physically is. This fact makes color the most relative medium in art."


"The system is the work of art; the visual work of art is the proof of the System. The visual aspect can't be understood without understanding the system. It isn't what it looks like but what it is that is of basic importance."
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