the average man does not want to be free. he simply wants to be safe.
I FEEL NO SHAME ABOUT HAVING PAINTINGS BE AS GRANDIOSE AND RIDICULOUS AS POSSIBLE.
I feel like there's a space of personal freedom for me where my art-making happens. When I go to that space, I'm completely in the world of possibility.
For me, at some point, the idea of struggling through the process was not as interesting as doing tests and executing the painting after I figured out all of its elements and how they were going to work together.
In art school, they teach you to struggle through the process: If you have your image down, you've painted it, and it's not looking the way you wanted it to, you can do wet on wet - you just keep moving the image around.
I'm not sure a lot of other people would walk up to the same artwork and see the shadow on the person's face from the hat and be like "Do you see that!" It's about noticing things that interest you, and that definitely happens with the natural world as well.
In high school I was good at math and everybody wanted me to do something with that - mathematics or engineering - which was a nightmare scenario for me. Meeting other artists and going to punk rock shows at that age, there was a feeling of freedom and community that I wanted to partake in.
This is courage in a man: to bear unflinchingly what heaven sends.
Give God the margin of eternity to justify himself.
It appears to me that one great cause of our difference in opinion on subjects which we often discuss is that you have always in mind the immediate and temporary effects of particular changes, whereas I put these effects quite aside, and fix my whole attention on the long-term effects that will result from them.
Barrons was powerful, broodingly good-looking, insanely wealthy, frighteningly intelligent, and had exquisite taste, not to mention a hard body that emitted some kind of constant low-level charge. Bottom line: He was the stuff of heroes. And psychotic killers.