Artist Quotes - Page 265

There's just some dysfunctionalism with artists.

An artist is a prophet and seer, not a paint craftsman or design maker, or reporter or entertainer... the artist has the superiorly searching perception with which that world outside of man's contamination can be penetrated and the truth drawn out from it.

Mickalene [Thomas] is an artist that I have admired for a long time. So much of her work inspires me - I spend time looking at her work when I'm writing. I feel like we're working toward the same themes, and I see our work in conversation, whether we know it or not.

I always say that my artist statement is to not be afraid to talk about the messiness - the unpleasant feelings and happenings around my life.

I also think that [political turmoil] gives artists something, a way of kind of processing.

I always say that my artist statement is to not be afraid to talk about the messiness - the unpleasant feelings and happenings around my life. I also try to convey what it feels like and sounds like and smells like and looks like inside of my particular skin, to move through the world as a black American woman in her mid-twenties. Language from songs and TV shows feel integral because it helps to create the environment and describe the full picture.

Artists will come into my office and say, "I just came from another label and they said you're research guys, you're data guys." I don't know what that means. Everybody who says that is being naive.

Working a model liberated me from ever having to hold a day job. I transitioned from doing that to working full-time as an artist. If you're 19 and living cheap, being an artist model can sustain you. I dropped out of college at 21 and my illustration hadn't yet taken off. It is more than working in a store. It is a hard way to make a living but you earn more than in a similarly unskilled job.

I came in as an established artist. People were hiring me for what I did and for who I was. I think that has given me a vast amount of leeway; I feel so lucky that I came in that way.

Taro came into the room, strands of hair flying free of the tie at the back of his skull, sweat plastering his cream-colored shirt against his chest and back. I wished I had an artist's skill, that I could make renderings of him in all his states of beauty. He would never want to look at them, or even know about them. I would just like them for myself. Maybe he would want to see them when he was much older, and beautiful in a different way.

The paralysis that we have right now when we think about migration is partly because we can't imagine what the world would look like in the future. So I think it's important for writers and artists to try to imagine that.

Artists are in the imagining/ prototyping business. Society needs people to be out there thinking of what might be. That cannot be something we just delegate to politicians or technologists.

One of the central flaws in the state of contemporary music is that the major record companies have failed to incorporate that simple fact into their business plans. They've come into an industry that's based on idiosyncratic artists and tried to erase every idiosyncratic aspect out of it.

An artist in 2014 who is thinking about album sales is either sadly deluded or has to make so many commercial compromises that it sort of takes the joy out of making music.

A lot of people do talk about the demise of the album, but I still believe that if an artist tries hard to make a great album, people will buy it and listen to it as an album, rather than just a collection of random songs.

Some people are really drawn to technology and I liken them to artists.

I will never be the best dancer or artist. I will be growing until the day I retire.

All my favorite artists are downtempo - Portishead, Burial, a lot of 1990s trip-hop. Some people are saying that I'm trying to help with the trip-hop revival that's possibly going on, but I'm not aware of other artists that are necessarily doing that. But if they are, that's fantastic. It's a great medium of electronic music. There's a lot of emotion - it's good for soundtracking a late-night drive.

There are so many artists these days that are trying to imitate other artists and go for a certain style; there's a lot of bullshit in the music industry. I don't want to deviate from anything else other than the music, cause that's why I listen to my favorite records - not because I like the way the artists dress.

It's only when it's smoothed out by history and we try to make sense of it - this incredibly complicated period when everyone's doing something different every day - that we look for those stylistic similarities and we say, "Well, that's what that was about," and sort of forget all the other nuance. I definitely feel that that's true for this time in my community of artists, and I'm sure that it was true at other times too.

There are some superficial things that connect me to the stream. There's instrumentation, there's timbre, use of electronics, the way that samples are used, the way the electric guitar is used. I'm thinking of things that are particular to this era. But I don't always feel particularly close to the music of my peers. I often feel that I have more in common with writers and visual artists. I try to connect to people in an emotional kind of way.

Sometimes you feel some artists are doing the same thing that you're doing but in a different field. But they have the same approach. Their method of research and gathering data is the same as yours.

I like collaborating, but I felt I should do my first single by myself so people don't think I'm leaning on other artists to be a success.

I really enjoy writing and producing for other artists. Some people save their best songs for their own albums. I'd rather give another artist one of my songs. At the end of the day, it still represents me.

I'm a big believer in the collective unconscious. The idea that there is a deep connection between all of us that goes back to our ancestors and forward to the people who will come after us. It's essentially the job of the artist to anchor that nebulous space, and I think that's what a writer does: goes to that strange place and brings back these little trinkets. The unspoken experience percolated throughout the generations allows you to have knowledge of things you wouldn't know first hand.