You just pray that something is going to hit you like lightning. Like a movie, a book, or a photograph, a painting, something that you can riff on it and learn more about it and explore it, and just go on a journey with it. So lots of times when I choose a theme, I'll also incorporate other things that I'm doing at that period.
The artistic process in digital art is very much the same as for making other kinds of paintings.
I kept. . . . returning to the (ancient Roman) wall paintings with their veiled melancholy and elegant plasticity.
I think that in the last twenty years or so, there's been a new kind of honesty in painting where painters have been very proud of paint and have let it behave openly.
Why do we smile? Why do we laugh? Why do we feel alone? Why are we sad and confused? Why do we read poetry? Why do we cry when we see a painting? Why is there a riot in the heart when we love? Why do we feel shame? What is that thing in the pit of your stomach called desire?
I am more a friend of art than a producer of painting.
What can be said about a man who is interested in nothing but his painting? It's a pity if a man can only interest himself in one thing. But I can't do any thing else. I have only one interest.
When Michael Werner saw a painting of mine, such as Die grosse Nacht im Eimer, which back then nobody wanted and everybody thought was ridiculous, he realized that this was the right provocation, that it represented the feeling of the times in the right way.
You have to live in a state of thinking your painting is good, or you couldn't do it.
Bonnat tells me, 'Your painting isn't bad, it is chic, but even so it isn't bad, but your drawing is absolutely atrocious. ' So I must gather my courage and start once again.
I’ve learnt from experience that a painting isn’t finished when you put down your brush - that’s when it starts. The public reaction is what supplies meaning and value. Art comes alive in the arguments you have about it.
If you understand a painting beforehand, you might as well not paint it.
The freer the soul, the more abstract painting becomes.
The best way to begin is to say: Balthus is a painter of whom nothing is known. And now let us have a look at his paintings.
Creation rather than painting, or if painting, yet such, and with such co-presence of the whole picture flash'd at once upon the eye, as the sun paints in a camera obscura. (Describing his poetic ideal, 1817)
Painting is a mosaic of colors weaved into a seamless whole.
My aim in painting has always been the most exact transcription possible of my most intimate impression of nature.
Arts is like the power of now. When you're performing, when you're playing, when you're sculpting, painting, it's that moment. I'm in the moment of my life, and that's what I love to do.
To his surprise he also discovered that it was possible to be good at what you had little interest in, just as it had been possible to be bad at something, whether painting or poetry, that you cared about a great deal.
My skills are not of the highest caliber, but I know a thing or two, and I occasionally produce a painting that contains passages of truth and beauty.