Painters From The United States

"Feminism should be a fight for fairness. Instead the fight is only to control outcome. And when feminists don’t like outcome, they assume something’s unfair. Like fools. Most of the left is the same way."

"Tolerance is tolerance is tolerance.Period, you assholes. Today’s intolerant, young, liberal California/ New Yorkers are only comfortable within their own shared consensus. Friends must think alike and believe the same things now. They must vote the same and defend the same ideology like zombies. Anyone who disagrees can only be evil, stupid, and wrong."

"The reasons why I do things are difficult for me to understand and difficult for me to explain."

"The common purpose of pornography is to enhance sexual pleasure or sexual fantasy. It is meant to be free of things like guilt, insecurity, anger or responsibility. It can also be detached from the struggles of intimacy. I chose to use imagery common in pornography but placed these images in the emotional context which included intense guilt, anger, regret, anguish, and confusion. In this context, it is difficult for the images to enhance sexual pleasure or sexual fantasy. Instead, the graphic images work better to enhance the discomfort of intimacy."

"Listening to nasty remarks about me or my work doesn’t feel good. I don’t enjoy being unpopular, however in order to think freely, I must be willing to risk being unpopular. To think, I must risk being offensive. Anyway, most people are not listening but instead projecting."

"I like Donald Trump a lot and am extremely proud he is the American President. And I’m sorry if that offends you."

"I hope my work is more interesting and more intelligent than I am."

"I sure do like the color brown. And pink. Pink and brown. If I had to choose, pink would lose."

"Jean-Michel Basquiat was one of the most talented, charming, charismatic, clever, bright, irresponsible, self-centered, self-indulgent, lying bastards that I've ever met."

"I don't drink any coffee or take any drugs and I don't smoke cigarettes and I don't eat sugar and I don't take any medicine at all. I eat a lot of fish, vegetables, and I stay away from starches."

"I never wanted to be an actor. I never want to be an actor. I want to be a movie star. The whole idea of having to act is too gruesome. It's too ambitious for me."

"I'm not a career filmmaker and by that I'm not tearing down people who are, but I'm not Wes Anderson who can rent out a floor at the Chateau Marmont for a month to write my new screenplay--I have a life outside of filmmaking and after Buffalo '66, I genuinely thought I was done with making movies. But they pulled me back in. This Brown Bunny, it had something in it for me that I just had to say. I had to express it, it was in me and it ate its way out of me. I wished that it didn't, but it did and I was surprised to find myself shooting again."

"I've only had three idols in my life. Johnny Unitas, the quarterback for the Colts, Richard Nixon, and Chris Squire, the bass player for Yes-Squire being my number one. My love, fascination and devotion for Chris Squire is deep. The pain of my whole childhood was sedated by listening to Yes, King Crimson, and Genesis records. And now here I am, 25 years later, and my Yes obsession is the only thing I haven't outgrown."

"The best articles about Vincent Gallo were written by Vincent Gallo, the best acting performance of Vincent Gallo was directed and edited by Vincent Gallo from a screenplay written by Vincent Gallo, even the best photographs of Vincent Gallo were taken by Vincent Gallo."

"My collages are only ideas for things much larger – things to cover walls. In fact all the things that I have done I would like to see much larger. I am not interested in painting as it has been accepted for so long – to hang on walls of houses as pictures. To hell with pictures – they should be the wall – even better – on the outside wall – of large buildings. Or stood up outside as billboards or a kind of modern 'icon'. We must make our art like the Egyptians, the Chinese & the African and the Island primitives – with their relation to life. It should meet the eye direct."

"Most people want to be actors because they want unconditional love and power and money and to be able to act out a character fantasy that involves themselves. So if one is truly honest about themselves in that way, then you're on the right path. If not, the process becomes convoluted. You have to go out grab it, and demand it."

"This book [full of linoleum prints] will be an alphabet of pictorial elements without text, which shall aim at establishing a larger scale of painting, a closer contact between the artist and the wall, and a new spirit of art accompanying architecture."

"I'm interested in the mass and color, the black and the white, the edges happen because the forms get as quiet as they can be."

"I’m clearly a small-minded person, with my own petty grievances. Hopefully, my work transcends my own petty grievances and small-minded nature. It’s best for me to remain small-minded on an emotional level and broad-minded on a conceptual level. It doesn’t matter whatever it is that makes me do my work. Neurosis, obsession, wanting people to like me, wanting my parents to feel bad for underrating me, making a lot of money, power, social status, wanting girls to like me or just to meet one girl on a job. All of this doesn’t matter as long as the work that I do to achieve these small-minded needs is a lot more interesting than me and my reasons for making it"

"I made the photographs just like I draw.. .I wanted the photographs [Kelly made circa 1950 in Paris] to be enlightening to my art.."

"Joey Ramone was clearly one of the most original singers of all time. And he was the sweetest guy. And his death is very sad."

"If the film language and sensibility are not integrated somewhere in the narrative, then they are inconsequential, separate. And if you have one point of view, one aesthetic, one sensibility throughout everything you do, and you don't let people sway you away from that, especially your cinematographer, then the film develops a soul."

"There is always for me a dominant figure, I simply don't agree with people who see both readings as possible [of the figure ànd ground]"

"Being an artist means seeing things and never having the ability to shut your eyes."

"It's not who you know, but who you are that matters most."

"My soul is a canvas stretched across four wooden corners and tacked with copper nails that sink into the edges of timber like teeth. My art is nothing less than my salvation."

"If it hurt me to have to give up a painting I figured it had to hurt them to write the check. That's how I came up with the price for my work."

"I aim to remind the warrior within us all to navigate through the unknown that we may meet the morning, improved and unenslaved."

"This dress is something I would want to be buried in! (On wanting to be buried in the painting she converted into a dress.)"

"Titian, Tintoretto, and Paul Veronese absolutely enchanted me, for they took away all sense of subject. ... It was the poetry of color which I felt, procreative in its nature, giving birth to a thousand things which the eye cannot see, and distinct from their cause."

"Thus falling, falling from afar, As if some melancholy star Had mingled with her light her sighs, And dropped them from the skies."

"During my youth, I was fascinated by the colors of Van Goth's paintings"

"My favourite painting is often the one or the collection that I am currently working on. This is probably due to the fact that I don’t yet know where it will take me."

"A Modern Rothko: Color field Paintings by Joseph Pisani"

"In 1995, when I was backpacking through Europe solo, I would head to the train station, look up at the big board, and decide right there and then where I would go that day."

"Being born in New York City, tends to lead to big expectations, expectations that I only started to realize after I had left."

"I’m the type of person that likes to dream big, and I’ve often found that every great journey begins with a dream"

""How to do Everything in Just One Lifetime" is a Statement, not a question. I don't understand why people keeping imagining a question mark at the end."

"All the possessions in the world cannot fill an empty heart with love."

"While traveling, I’ve found that spontaneity keeps things fresh, while serendipity guides me through it all. There have been a lot of rough moments along the way, but they often bear the best memories."

"Color is to the eye what music is to the ear."

"I have always striven to fix beauty in wood, stone, glass or pottery, in oil or watercolor by using whatever seemed fittest for the expression of beauty, that has been my creed."

"God has given us our talents, not to copy the talents of others, but rather to use our brains and imagination in order to obtain the revelation of true beauty."

"John Sloan not having been abroad [in contrary to Hopper himself], has seen these things [Sloan's interpretations in his etchings of New York during the 1910's] with a truer and fresher eye than most.. .The hard early training has given to Sloan a facility and a power of invention that the pure painter seldom achieves."

"For a brief time, roughly between 1912 and 1918, The Masses became the rallying center-as sometimes also a combination of circus, nursery, and boxing ring-for almost everything that was then alive and irreverent in American culture. In its pages you could find brilliant artists and cartoonists, like John Sloan, Stuart Davis, and Art Young; one of the best journalists in our history, John Reed (journalist), a writer full of an indignation against American injustice that was itself utterly American; a shrewd and caustic propagandist like Max Eastman; some gifted writers of fiction, like Sherwood Anderson; and one of the few serious theoretical minds American socialism has produced, William English Walling. All joined in a rumpus of revolt, tearing to shreds the genteel tradition that had been dominant in American culture, poking fun at moral prudishness and literary timidity, mocking the deceits of bourgeois individualism, and preaching a peculiarly uncomplicated version of the class struggle. There has never been, and probably never will again be, another radical magazine in the U. S. quite like The Masses, with its slapdash gathering of energy, youth, hope."

"In attempting to break new ground in his painting during the 1920's, Hopper found inspiration in Joan Sloan's interpretations of New York.. .He particularly admired the paintings and prints [etchings] produced just after Sloan's arrival in New York from Philadelphia in 1904.. .Among his contemporaries, Hopper seems to have identified most closely with Sloan, who like himself had worked as an illustrator at the beginning of his career.. .More than anything else, Sloan's choice of subject matter made an impression on Hopper during his formative years. Many subjects, and even titles like 'Night Windows' and 'Barber Shop' appeared first in Sloan's work and subsequently in Hopper's. Common themes include a woman in an interior by a window, city rooftops, urban street scenes, and city parks, restaurants and movie theaters."

"The idea of taking up art as a calling, a profession, is a mirage. Art enriches life. It makes life worth living. But to make a living at it—that idea is incompatible with making art."

"Then there is this idea that the world owes you a living. Here is a little thought about that. It isn't particularly logical but it makes my point. You were paid when you were born, with the privilege of living. Death is all that is coming to you. Life came to you when you were born."

"[choosing his scenes by:] ..night vigils at the back window."

"It takes a great deal of strong personality to survive the art school training. Hard nuts that the art schools can't crack and devour get through and become artists."