Artist Quotes - Page 230

I think white artists have a responsibility to be not only naming white supremacy, but to be using their power and privilege to support artists of color.

Should I be collaborating with artists of color solely because of their race and my politics? This question is weighted with my own worry that I have been invited to speak or collaborate solely because of my race, and not because of my abilities.

It's exciting to consider how art, in its ability to reveal, can be ahead of the artist.

All artists need a room of their own

There are no teachers, saints, prophets, good people, but the artists.

The gallery closed its doors in 1971. I could no longer psychologically handle the needs of 12 artists. I cared about all of them, and what was happening with their careers. I'm just not a person who can do that indefinitely. And tax-wise I was concerned because they gallery wasn't making money; it was losing money.

I think the four land artists I showed all worked within a few years of each other. And they were standard bearers, I suppose, for land art. They each did very separate things. Apparently, later in California, a lot of artists started working in that medium and there was something of a rush of earthworks. But I wasn't involved with that.

Had opened a gallery I already had strong connections with New York, because I was taking work on consignment from New York dealers. So I already knew a great many of the dealers and the artists here. It wasn't cold for me.

Love trumps everything. Love's decision will not always be kind to your artistic life.

Nature always begins by resisting the artist, but he who really takes it seriously does not allow that resistance to put him off his stride; on the contrary, it is that much more of a stimulus to fight for victory.

An artist need not be a minister or a collector in church, but he must have a warm heart for people, and I find it a noble thing that, for example, no winter passed without The Graphic doing something to keep alive sympathy for the poor.

To try to understand the real significance of what the great artists, the serious masters, tell us in their masterpieces, that leads to God; one man wrote or told it in a book; another, in a picture.

In order to work and to become an artist one needs love. At least, one who wants sentiment in his work must in the first place feel it himself, and live with his heart

It seems to me it's a painter's duty to try to put an idea into his work.

l can do very well without God both in my life and in my painting, but l cannot, ill as I am, do without something which is greater than l, which is my life — the power to create.

Gauguin says that when sailors have to move a heavy load or raise an anchor, they all sing together to keep them up and give them vim. That's just what artists lack!

I have a tendency to think that that stereotype of American movies and Hollywood movies doesn't exist. Of course you have the studios that have a very hard policy upon their artists, but then I haven't really been doing any real Hollywood movie yet.

Working with David Cronenberg or Darren Aronofsky or even Steven Soderbergh isn't really like a typical Hollywood movie. These are true artists, and have a certain amount of freedom when they work, and they're more like independent filmmakers making their way through big studios. I still don't feel like I've been part of the stereotypical Hollywood system.

As an artist, I can't be responsible for how people interpret material.

Just be comfortable. Sometimes, when open up for a bigger artist at a conventional concert, you can feel unwelcome. But when you're playing a festival, people come to see music in general - so don't be fearful. The people are there to enjoy and discover new music so approach the show with confidence and optimism.

Some movies are what I would call murky. Just because it's murky doesn't make it artistic. It makes it hard to see.

In a painting, you can't make out whether the artist painted the left eye before the right eye. In Chinese calligraphy, you can see the progression of the artist's stroke.

Only in the 20th century, artists started taking the study of perception in a more humane way. They were thinking about the eye as being an instrument, the whole body as being a visual instrument. That sort of gave way a little bit with Cartesian­ - the "Cogito ergo sum" argument. It's not, "I think therefore I exist." It's, "I feel therefore I think therefore I exist."

I love music, and can dance on the desi beats. Punjabi music is my favourite. I listen to artists like Honey Singh. I love his music. I also love watching Bollywood films.

If you look at my collaborations, it is very much in line with all these others in the sense that it is a building of community, particularly among artists of color. This is what I learned from the example of elder African-American artists, which is where it is all coming from; to refuse to be silenced.