For me making a digital photo is like making a watercolor. . . It's not a painting, and it's not a photo. It's something altogether new.
When I get intimate with my paintings, it's a real good spiritual thing to get off my chest. Same as playing the instruments is a great release.
There is no such thing as good painting about nothing.
Watercolour painting is notoriously difficult - so much depends on directness and speed, and certainty of intention. Tentative or fumbling touches are disastrous, for they cannot be obliterated easily.
They are specific places I have discovered here and there when I am on the road to take photos. I go especially to take photos.
The picture that approaches sculpture nearest Is the best picture.
I mean, part of the justification for art is art history, the fact that you're part of this tradition. You can't really operate outside of it. So looking for what this work is really about, if I look at Velázquez, if I look at Las Meninas or The Tapestry Weavers [1657] or something and really study it and try to figure out what that painting is really about, then I find relationships between what I'm trying to do and what he was doing.
When technique is obtrusive it becomes mere mannerism, a conscious striving for effect. It is only a means to an end - the manner of putting paint to paper. It hardly embraces the expressive side of painting.
That's why I ended up going to Lancaster University, because they had a visual arts course, and in the first year it was like a broad visual arts course in sculpture, painting, graphics - all of that.
My painting does not come from the easel.
I never want to stop painting. I'm 94 now. What's my secret? I just keep thinking about the painting I'm going to do tomorrow.
Poetry fettered, fetters the human race. Nations are destroyed or flourish in proportion as their poetry, painting, and music are destroyed or flourish.
A cinematographer is a visual psychiatrist - moving an audience through a movie. . . making them think the way you want them to think, painting pictures in the dark.
How vain painting is-we admire the realistic depiction of objects which in their original state we don't admire at all.
Doubt is a central factor all the time. There's always the doubt: What the hell am I doing out here in the middle of the woods, all alone, painting?
I dream of painting and then I paint my dream.
But you begin to feel as you go on working that unless painting proves its right to exist by being critical and self-judging, it has no reason to exist at all - or is not even possible. The canvas is a court where the artist is prosecutor, defendant, jury and judge. Art without a trial disappears at a glance.
The best way to understand a painting is by drawing it.
Painting cannot be the only activity of a mature artist.
Painting is the intermediate between a thought and a thing.