I always believed that my work should be unfinished in the sense that I encourage people to add their creativity to it, either conceptually or physically. Back in the 1960s, I was calling for 'Unfinished Music,' number one, and number two, with my artwork - I was taking unfinished work into the gallery. And that's how I was looking at it.
The meaning of an artwork is changing depending on who's looking at it - depending on what culture, depending on what time, and so forth. It's alive.
My dad and I collaborate on the artwork. He does all of the design and layout. He uses my sketches and drawings or weird things to mix into it or put on the merch.
You make an open-ended proposition and the audience completes it somehow. That’s what you hope an artwork to be-a constantly living thing.
Whenever you finish an artwork and the viewer comes and views it, at that moment you've given up control.
I wish my artwork could persuade millions of people to join a global conversation about sustainability.
The adventurous state of mind is a high house. . . The joy of adventure is unaccountable. This is the attractiveness of artwork. It is adventurous, strenuous and joyful.
I have thousands of tapes, and photos and fliers, letters, posters, artwork - basically everything that ever happened, I kept. I'm not a hoarder, though. I'm sort of a librarian.
The business of living - that's your artwork, and the process of that is finding out who you are, what it all means.
The artwork for the record is kind of an homage to that. It's a collage, which rhymes with homage, I just realized. It's an homage to this kind of almost like a teenager's idea of what the future might look like, if he were using a Xerox machine and cut-and-pasting it together. Which is exactly what we did to come up with the artwork.
I was very conceptual about what I was doing; I had the first five albums planned out, and all the songs on every album, and the artwork. I always had these ambitious musical projects in mind.
There is the artwork that you physically make but there's also the journey that happens on the inside.
I get to do some kind of artwork almost everyday and it just so happens that I can pay the bills and support my family while doing it.
There are so many different desires that make you execute an artwork.
You never really get to touch anything that you're doing unless you print it out. I don't really enjoy making artwork on a computer because it doesn't seem like I've done anything.
Can you remember how you felt when you were communicating through your artwork? Not just the sense of completion, but the sense of rightness- the sense that you had brought to life something that could live beyond your sphere of being, that held in it far more potential than you ever realized you were imbuing in the work?
Although my everyday artwork is tattoo oriented, I definitely do not try to limit my art or art mediums.
In a sense, the artwork is the most important thing in getting somebody to buy a book. The person probably won't buy a book if he doesn't like the artwork. Once you buy it for the artwork, you hope that the story will also be good.
The viewer brings something individual to the experience of any artwork.
Like any artwork, things become richer if you know more about them; but I don't think that's crucial.