Artist Quotes - Page 269

I don't need to control the mind of my viewer. Now this might sound contradictory because I want to make these installations set up an environment that will produce a certain kind of experience in the viewer, but beyond a certain point, I take hands off and leave it up to chance and personal experience. So maybe it's a marriage of control and no control we're talking about where the artist produces the artifact or the environment and then walks away from it, and the second half of the equation is the viewer and their personal history and how they feel about what they're experiencing.

I want to create objects that will stimulate the viewer in ways that I am stimulated by these objects. Now that's an ideal situation and the artist has no control over what his audience is going to think, but they can try to communicate some quality, some poetry through the work and just hope that the viewer has something in the vicinity of a similar experience.

We're living history all the time, in the papers, in the news, you think about stuff and it goes into your brain and you think about it and it comes out somehow. You have an idea; you've heard a phrase, or you're angry, or something disturbs you, or something seems paradoxical to you, you explore that idea, much like a writer would explore maybe an idea through metaphor. Maybe artists use their vehicle to explore ideas, so I think the things that interest me are the kind of idea of continuous change and how nothing stays the same and it's always disintegrating into something more.

I see myself as a very eclectic person and artist. I use all kinds of sources for the work as maybe some large pieces. Ideas come from all kinds of areas; literature, popular culture, dreams, you name it.

I honestly think that it was when the actual voices started to stand up for me. It was the iconic artists like Tony Bennett or Barbara Streisand or Liza Minnelli. When people like that take you under their wing and say in quotations, "He's the next one. He's got my stamp of approval," people trust them.

I really appreciate artists of the 20th century, and I can see a lot of their influence on my work, but to suggest that my design only fits within an 'ism' kind of bothers me.

As an artist, I think it is important for us to mark places in history where we have made progress, to celebrate by expressing that reality.

Sometimes being an artist is a real drag. It can be incredibly bureaucratic.

God works funny so it might have just been meant for me to be an artist that doesn't sell two million records. Maybe my records might change somebody's life rather than sell thru the roof.

Allow the artist to finish the piece of work before you critique it.

I get nervous calling myself an artist. I feel I'm more like an interpreter or a violinist, you know.

She [Barbra Streisand] was just - we can't know what we mean to each other. You know, artists, you can't know - you can't know that, but she was really important.

A long term goal is to encourage students to start doing concerts in which I or the other artists will come back at the end of the school year to see their concerts.

My parents always saw me as an artist, and that greatly influenced me

I've also been writing for other artists, producing other artists, doing some country stuff. Those lyrics I tend to leave more universal.

When I lived in Seattle and Oregon, we partied, which is a large reason I don't know drugs or alcohol now because I saw the Destruction of so many great musicians and artists.

To me to be a solo artist means I can do so many new and exciting things and I feel very strongly that one must evolve and grow. I love being a bass player and I feel really good that I was able to spend a focused chapter defining that role, but I'm not someone that likes being in the same role forever.

For me going solo meant freedom to collaborate and do whatever I feel I'm good at doing. For me it was really not ever expanding as an artist, developing everything from my songwriting to my singing to my mission statement to my vision. I've been so inspired by all the creative freedom that it brings that I have no complaints.

I consider myself more of an international artist than I do a one-territory artist, which I think is a blessing.

I've admired Alicia Keys since before I got into the music industry, just everything she represents as a female artist.

Bob Marley is one of the most recognized artists. He didn't care to be defined. People wondered, 'Is it reggae? Is it rock?' But at the end of the day they were still playing his music and that's what matters.

You called me a natural con artist and asked me what other secrets I was hiding. I didn't answer because I already knew, in some deep, primal way, what furtive truth you were referring to: That I was destined to fall in love with you.

Does madness bring creativity? Or does creativity cause madness? Can an artist create without the ups so high and the downs so low?

If you don't have a dream as an artist, you shouldn't be an artist, because you should be working towards something and trying to reach that always, whatever that is.

Wasn't the whole point of being an artist, or at least part of it, that you didn't have to wear a tie?