Artist Quotes - Page 267

All artists are illusionists of one kind or another.

Realistically there is no limit to the possibilities. How does an artist make decisions?

I've been very lucky with the people I've met over the years. Way back in the early '70s I went to [Phil] Seuling's conventions for something like three years in a row from '70 to '72 and I remember at the '72 luncheon with the Academy of Comic Book Artists and talking with John Romita about the kind of brushes he used. Pros ask pros the same questions that fans do. "What kind of pens do you use? What kind of brushes do you use?" I was so amazed that the wonderful work John Romita was doing was accomplished with a Windsor-Newton series 7 Number 4. Not a 2 or a 3, but a 4.

I know some stories about "liberation" and stuff that's been liberated by people who turn around and get on their soapbox about how it's unfair that the artists didn't benefit while they're sitting on stuff that they "liberated," but that's another story for another time.

I sometimes look at the careers of other... I guess I could call them contemporaries or maybe close artists; you know, the 4 or 5 guys who go to New York City and get a loft and work together and use each other as models and that sort of thing and wait for years and years to get married. Maybe I just wasn't that definite.

You can't make a movie about the artist without shooting outdoors.

Even though hip-hop started as a battle format, different artists appeared on each other's records or hung out in the same clubs, supporting each other. That was a profound influence. Also, hip-hop, to me, represents limitless possibility. Hip-hop is always evolving. People say, "Oh, it's a very commercial thing, it's too R&B." But in six months, a record is gonna come out that will completely change that.

When you come from nowhere, I am fully aware of the fact that people have to compare you to other artists to kind of place you.

I'd never compare myself to Freddie Mercury because I look up to him far too much. As an artist, not necessarily as a person.

I think at any point, as an artist, whatever the medium - just having an audience means the world.

I don't think I live the lifestyle that's expected of a quote unquote R&B artist. I'm just not that dude.

I mean, there's plenty of artists who are making R&B music, but because of their ethnicity, it's considered something else.

I feel that as artists - whatever your medium is - I feel that we're watching what goes on around us and we take what we don't see, or we don't hear, or we don't feel and we do something that speaks of it; more about it, for it, or against it - whatever our perspective is - that's what our job is.

An artist usually has no friends except other artists, and usually they do not like his work.

The history of the creative progress of individual artists shows that, along with their spiritual growth and the increasing complexity of their inner life, their forms of expression become more complex.

I want to keep acting and I want to keep working with high quality artists. I might be a bit spoiled because they're so good at what they do. I think the only way you learn is to surround yourself with people that are better than you.

There was a great sense of community mainly among the women artists at the time because we felt left out. I still know most of the women that I knew then, the ones that are still alive.

One of the reasons that I went to Mexico aside from the Maya and the pre-Columbian aspect of it was that I wanted to work with [Diego] Rivera, which I did, on a mural that he was painting at the time. But at some point I realized that I wasn't going to be a political artist, it just wasn't in my repertoire.

I think I would prefer to partner with someone once I've established what I actually am trying to do as a solo artist with my actual name.

I'm inspired by almost every artist I come across.

The internet, like social media, seems to me to depend on how you use it, where you spend your time on it. I used to be quite anti-social media, but I can see now that it can be a good tool for artists, a way for us to speak to each other outside of standard economies and across languages and borders.

Staying true to my vision, to the word as it comes to me, to my own aesthetic judgments, even when they disagree with the majority culture, is very important to me, and I think important for every artist. It's what we have: our voice, our intuition, the truth as we understand and know it.

I thought 'The Artist' was a perfect way to find a good balance. The artistic challenge is obvious because the film is black-and-white and its silent, but I did my best to make the movie accessible and easy to watch. I really don't want to make elitist movies. I really try hard to work for the audience. Audiences are smart. They get everything.

The Germans were much more graphical. The expressionism is much more than cinema. It was a movement with artists, painters, music and architecture, so it's really graphic and visual. And the French were something else.

I usually go to bed early to read. I read and I always say that I'm not a "bohemian artist;" I need to read for one or two hours in the evening, and the quiet, so I don't hang out a lot.