I like the transience of Klimt paintings.
How are we going to make painters by lecturing to them? We are going to make questioners, doubters, and talkers. We are going to make painters by painting ourselves, and by showing the paintings of others. By working frankly from our convictions, we are going to make them work frankly from theirs.
With respect to the use of this sparkling coloured material (butterfly wings around 1955, fh) - the constituent parts of which remain indistinguishable - with the aim of producing a very vivid effect of scintillation, I realised that, for me, this responds to needs of the same order as those that formerly led me, in many drawings and paintings, to organize my lines and patches of colour so that the objects represented would meld into everything around them, so that the result would be a sort of continuous, universal soup with an intensive flavour of life.
That's where I got the idea to paint the walls of the gallery with varied colours [at the Whitechapel show]. I tried to figure out how all these Renaissance paintings manage to work together.
Some people have recognized their friends in my paintings, but I'm not directly responsible for any hooking up as far as I know!
My best training came from doing illustrations because it taught me to compose my paintings more effectively, to improve my colors, and to be ruthlessly selective.
The time is a thing; you don't have so much time. A good trick is to try and think about a way to use material from one occupation for the other. It's like going through working a day job, this is so dumb to say, but you know how Julian Schnabel made those crockery paintings while he was working as a short-order cook? It's like that, using what is around, transforming that to create meaning and make art. Trying to take nothing and make. . . something.
It is to be remembered that all art is magical in origin - music, sculpture, writing, painting - and by magical I mean intended to produce very definite results. Paintings were originally formulae to make what is painted happen. Art is not an end in itself, any more than Einstein's matter-into-energy formulae is an end in itself. Like all formulae, art was originally FUNCTIONAL, intended to make things happen, the way an atom bomb happens from Einstein's formulae.
When you talk about painters and you talk about painters painting masterpieces, there is no painter who painted only one painting and that was a masterpiece. You have to do a whole bunch of paintings to get to the place of mastering your craft.
In my earlier paintings, I wanted the space between the picture plane and the spectator to be active. It was in that space, paradoxically, the painting 'took place. ' Then, little by little, and to some extent deliberately, I made it go the other way, opening up an interior space. . . so that there was a layered, shallow depth.
If I physically made every work myself, I would get only one or two paintings done a year, if that.
I did do, well before Pop Art, all the cartoon characters as paintings.
When you feel concentrated within the intensity of making paintings, you know exactly what you are doing.
Generally paintings are about technique, but I don't see myself as a painter. I am more of a storyteller and an image - maker.
That's why people listen to music or look at paintings. To get in touch with that wholeness.
When someone has to do work for me, I lose my mind. I can't help it, I'm a bit of a control freak. I've always wanted something that would depict slow-moving paintings, stunning artwork that also incorporates movement. It was hard letting someone else create that vision for me, but I love it.
My paintings are so legible, I feel guilty.
The white paintings came first; my silent piece came later.
I suppose in the end what shift occurred - is that at Yale I began to become more materially and conceptually aware of the mechanisms that gave rise to those types of patterns and paintings. And so the copying that happened in the childhood was a much more conscious type of copying in later years.
One of the interesting things I discovered is that in the late 19th century, painters actually had black-and-white copies made of their own paintings. They chose it even over photographs because they knew the photographic medium would distort their work.