Painters From The United States

"My current artwork uses the lines and patterns from daily weather maps and images of weather — rain, snow, clouds, hail — as visual metaphors for these ideas. It explores the constancy, variation, and violence hidden within the familiar, reassuring seasonal cycle. I also use images of oceans — stormy, placid, or dramatic — as visual reflections of human moods and emotions."

"Like a human life, my artwork is multi-layered, complex, and develops over time. Color, texture, humor, and the physical joy of applying paint and cutting relief prints are important in the creation of my work. In the process of creating a piece, I begin working on an idea with a loosely drawn skeleton. I add layers of paint and drawing, building up layers of meanings and emphasis to create a finished piece that is dense with meaning."

"Nothing is easy. It is not easy to have a baby, for a tree to grow--but that's what is beautiful. That is part of the beauty. To wish for a life of ease is ridiculous. When I think about how I really do feel it overcomes me. Then I wonder if I've done enough"

"As the days pass and the seasons change, the sky, earth, mountains and rivers repeat in patterns that are never really quite the same. In my search for the variations of the many faces in nature, I have found that nature provides an infinite source of inspiration for artistic expression,”"

"So, to answer your question, when I think of being an artist, I think of the central painting, between those two, showing Saint Matthew as an old man taking dictation from an angel, doing divine work on earth. The man depicted in the painting is a nincompoop and the angel is impatiently counting on his fingers, as if Matthew isn’t keeping up. It’s so funny: that’s Caravaggio’s wit. The Passion of Saint Matthew is one of the most beautiful testaments we have, but here he is shown as a very ordinary man. I believe Caravaggio related to Matthew because of how beautifully this story is depicted, with so much feeling and sensitivity. The three paintings show the utter transformation of a man over time."

"To grow the love of nature globally amongst the local and international art communities and to call attention to our need to preserve our earth,"

"I arranged the “Bad Habits” figurines into groups, which I studied to make the paintings. I was thinking about how Tintoretto made wax figures to illuminate scenes and understand complicated lighting. “Bad Habits” is about light. To keep my focus on that aspect of the work, I didn’t want to have to keep reinventing characters. I could have kept working on that series forever but I made myself stop. I realized that as an artist I was about more than that, so I forced myself to move on."

"One of the ideas about art that was gaining momentum when I was student, which I heard but didn’t take seriously, was that psychology has no place in painting. And so, as a 19-year-old, I responded by putting it back there, boldly and for no good fucking reason."

"Cool kids always think their shit doesn’t stink, but Fassbinder reminds us that our shit does stink, and on top of that it’s rotten, and it’s OK to admit that. We’re all human. I’m interested in formal language and emotional content—formalism and feelings have a perfect marriage, if you can handle it. Looking back, I realize how much of the work was led by a rather dry and clear process and yet the results are anything but dry. I set a path and let the weirdness and eccentric stuff come up on its own; all that content just found a place out of the orderly way I had set up the process."

"I have found painting in water media – acrylic demands an absolute control of the medium to achieve the various effects, textures, and transparencies.The scale of the painting is a challenge, but not a limitation for me. To produce on canvas or paper what I have in my mind, my ideas and feelings on the universe, is a great challenge"

"I’ve come to experience art like a séance. Over time you can meld minds with artists: you laugh and feel their humor, or you are shocked by their sadness and grief. The main thing that comes across in Bellini’s paintings is the awesome potency and profound depth of feeling that made them. I’ve spent a good deal of my life looking at paintings, and what stands out to me is that, no matter when the painters lived, there are a lot of similarities among them. The work carries markers of the artist’s inner life—be it Carroll Dunham’s or Giovanni Bellini’s—for us to connect to. I find that humanity in art very appealing because it just cuts away all the layers of academia. Scholarship can buoy understanding in some ways but after a point can also drag you down, away from the art. Since contemporary artists are not hired by, say, the Vatican, we have the freedom to ask ourselves what we believe in and then to assert that belief. It’s actually a powerful liberty to own, and especially nice in our time when there are so many women’s voices in the mix."

"I have no artistic creed or formula. I have no fixed aim to which I am bending every energy. I have made no wonderful or new artistic discovery. Perhaps I have not even a new vision…In so far as my life is rich in emotional and intellectual experiences, actual or in imagination, in so far as I seek for a deeper and more comprehensive grasp of things, in so far I shall have material from which to create."

"The best paintings of depositions, crucifixions and entombments are images that are familiar if you’ve ever buried someone you love. Just today, I saw an image in the New York Daily News of the brother of Moises Locón Yac, who was killed in the explosion on Second Avenue on March 26, collapsing in the arms of a Red Cross worker. You see the same configuration in paintings of Mary Magdalene mourning Christ. I remember things through great pictures. When I look at Renaissance masterpieces I recall scenes like the one on Second Avenue—the profound grief of families realizing that their loved ones have been killed."

"To believe in yourself and know who you are when others don't believe in you is the greatest accomplishment; to never give up, to never quit, to have faith and stand your ground. Never change who you are. Love yourself because you have already made it and you are... Somebody."

"We survived these years by never spending a cent on anything that was not essential...we saw that there was always money for materials...we made our own canvases...used the stretchers over and over, rolling up the finished pictures. When desperate we painted on both sides of the canvas (cited in Colleary 24)."

"The interesting thing about Hippies is how those male figures jump out from behind the central woman, and the painting did that to me—in the process of making it, the men said, “Ta-da!” They came out of the work. And I had to ask myself where to take it next. I think that Hippies should have come after the portraits it was shown with at David Zwirner this spring, but it didn’t, it came first. I decided to make six to eight portraits of incubi and succubae using the structural idea of a grisaille painting with a flourish of what is called cangiantismo, a sort of spectral color-wheel effect that contrasts the grays. In the 16th century the Italian viewer understood it as a signal that the supernatural had arrived."

"I’ve done grisaille paintings with flashes of intense color over the years. One painting like that would surface as an isolated element in a body of work every now and then. When Hippies appeared I wanted to see what would happen if I just stayed with it and didn’t let up. I really didn’t know where I was going, but at some point the art critic Christian Viveros-Fauné came to my studio and said it reminded him of the “Bad Babies” series [1991-92]. Both groups of paintings personify color. I remember looking at my palette table and telling Christian, “I just want to make this come alive.” It’s such a stupid idea, and yet I think that is what I did. I just had to keep believing in it. When things went wrong, when they veered off course, I would tell myself to just trust the process."

"Since pictures such as mine are so different from the pictures people are used to framing, it isn’t really strange that they should require different treatment. White not being a color (as is gold) forms the best frames for pictures high in key and in pure color, as it does not destroy the balance of color in the picture and brings out each color in its fuller intensity. Black is next best, I think."

"There are great Caravaggios in San Luigi dei Francesi in Rome—the Saint Matthew cycle. The first painting, on the left of the small chapel, is The Calling of Saint Matthew. Jesus points at Matthew, who sits across from him with his head down. Matthew is the only one who isn’t looking at Jesus. On the opposite wall, on the right side of the chapel, hangs the third painting that shows the end of the narrative, Matthew’s martyrdom: Matthew lies on the ground and some guy with a sword is standing over him, just about to murder him. Imagine how you’d feel in that moment! I stared at the painting for so long, fascinated by how everyone is freaking out except for Matthew, who is reaching up. What is he looking at? It’s an angel leaning over a cloud and extending a palm, as if holding a stick to a drowning man. You realize that Matthew is a man who lived and died with belief in eternal salvation, which is why he’s being murdered—he’s dying for his beliefs. It’s interesting that Caravaggio depicts him seeing his salvation. Everyone else sees horror and chaos, but Matthew sees an angel extending a palm. In this painting you witness him becoming something."

"I often wish I could go to my studio and paint all the time, but I can’t. I often feel disconnected, as if I’m waiting for instructions. It’s absolute torture. The first third of the time it took to make these recent paintings was spent going in every day but ending up with nothing. Then, slowly, something started to happen."

"Nothing is easy. It is not easy to have a baby, for a tree to grow—but that’s what is beautiful."

"That was partly why I made the “Bad Habits” sculptures in 1995. In going from painting to painting I was “recasting” my characters every time. I had to get to know them one by one and understand what they mean. I realized through Fassbinder that it would be interesting to have your blonde—your Hanna Schygulla—as one person in an ensemble of actors who each play a range of characters. The range should be small—you can’t make people be something they’re not. Fassbinder was aware of how to use everyone’s qualities. Their fading looks, like Fassbinder’s own physical deterioration, became his material. They all had to be very smart and not vain to allow this to happen. Fassbinder’s actors came from the theater and theater is close to sculpture, so perhaps they had an awareness of the sculptural properties of their bodies."

"My work explores the passing of time and the tension between the human longing for reassuring repetition and — at the same time — change. I am particularly interested in our human ability to see what we expect to see, to misinterpret, to see a partial picture as the whole, to disregard incremental change, or to completely overlook the significant."

"Misogyny. There is no exact parallel to the story. I didn’t read a great writer like Babel who contextualized it for me. What I learned from Guston is that if you point the finger at yourself first, then you are freer. Misogyny is so rampant, extreme and insidious that it doesn’t get called out nearly enough. A lot of men, including gay men, are misogynists, and a lot of women are too. I’ve experienced it personally from so many, and I can therefore assume that because I live in this society I must have absorbed it too, so if I want to talk about misogyny I have to first acknowledge the aspects of it I’ve absorbed. I’m not the kind of person or artist, nor do I admire the kind of person or artist, who proselytizes, pontificates or points outward at others. I admire Guston and Diane Arbus and Fassbinder because they show a myriad of internal conflicts. That’s what art is—a struggle filtered through the self. That is how it becomes generous."

"So much of my work is about doing the very obvious. Making art is like finding your Excalibur, the sword in the stone. It’s right there and others can tug and tug, but you have to be Arthur to pull it out. Anyone can decide, intellectually, to make paintings where “colors come alive as characters”—but try to do it! Few people can pull it off. You have to have lived your life in a certain way, and have believed all along that that is possible, in order to make it work."

"Although some members of the public misunderstood and even ridiculed her work, Marguerite seemed unaffected. She was brave and clear about who she was and what she believed. She also had William's full support, and they continued to paint in the same studio, helping each other with canvases, with ideas, with promoting their paintings. Although they struggled financially, these were rich, exciting years, and their collaboration nurtured them both. They exhibited paintings in their studio as well as at galleries, and they were at the center of the avant-garde community of American artists in New York (Kennedy 97)."

"It was a very important argument for me, because I understood that there is an orthodox way of looking at things: “This is a representation. This is not a pipe, it’s a painting. It’s not real,” which feels pretty obvious and rather dull at this point. There was this other possibility that seemed juicier and more fucked up and hopeful. And I did have to come to a synthetic approach to making, but once I could do that, I could also believe in painting again, and make it real again. I’ve taken it to that next step, and my gamble is to succeed or fail at that."

"Ever since we were at Yale together, John Currin has said he admires my ability to believe. I remember once in a critique of my work, my teacher William Bailey was furious that it didn’t have enough “fiction building.” He quoted Magritte: “Ceci n’est pas une pipe, Lisa!” I said, “But I want the paintings to be real!” To which he snapped, “Well, that’s not a good goal.” John was at that critique, and he jumped in, saying: “I actually think it’s amazing she thinks they’re real!”"

"I cannot say that I was very enthusiastic upon my first visit to the market. As an insight into a certain phase of French life it was most interesting, but I did not relish the idea of buying there, even if the vegetables were much fresher and more reasonable than in the stores. The European custom of displaying all manner of eatables on the street, unprotected from the dirt and dust, and even handling by the passers-by, was new and not at all pleasing to me. I had a feeling that everything was dirty, especially the people. Since then I have become acclimated and resigned to the fact that France and dirt are inseparable (April 18, 1909, 17)."

"When my aunt informed me that we lived in the famous Latin Quarter, I experienced a little shock of surprise. When I discovered the size of the Latin Quarter, there was another surprise, and an even greater one when I realized that in this awful Quartier Latin were the great universities and Art Schools of France; the lovely old Luxembourg garden with the Medici Palace now used as the Senate Chamber; the Pantheon, the Westminster Abbey of France; the old Cluny Palace with its hoary relics and ruined walls; and on through a long list of less celebrated but equally interesting places. It is the Student Quarter of Paris, more foreign than French, alive with Russians, Poles, English and Americans. [...] Here you will find living side by side, the girl whose father has made a fortune in oil and has sent his daughter abroad to finish her education and the little girl from Australia who has saved up her pennies for years that she might come and study painting in Paris and who lives in a bare little room, hardly knowing where her next meal will come from, but trusting the God of the Quarter, "Luck." There is a more democratic spirit here in the midst of this undemocratic people than we find in America itself. E veryone meets on the common ground for work, the only aristocracy is that of ability and success. Each one is here for a purpose; the air throbs with industry, enthusiasm and genius. Iris most inspiring; you meet so many who are so much more advanced than you that their attainments are something to look forward to, so many whose work is so far below your standard that you feel you have something to start with and are not discouraged (Burk, 90-91)."

"Painters have always had to believe in formal language. It just didn’t used to be called into question as much as it is now. It is a belief that pictures can be formally coded and tell a story, and that viewers will understand that code even if they are not painters themselves. In contemporary art the language of painting is like a dialect of ancient Greek—most people just don’t understand it. Furthermore I don’t know how many people are willing to relax and let the meaning of the painting unfold, but I like to think they will feel the power of the form, almost unconsciously, whether they want to or not."

"I love Solzhenitsyn’s writing for his insights into morality and humanity, and today I came across a quote from The Gulag Archipelago: “If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?” I love that idea. If you think of yourself as “good,” you should think about how easily you could be evil under different circumstances. It’s important to embrace the range and try to comprehend it. Philip Guston said something similar when he talked about imagining himself like Isaac Babel, who wrote about riding around with the Red Army during the Polish-Soviet War, witnessing rape, pillage and killing. Guston was able to envision himself not only through the lens of the Italian painters he adored, but through the hooded figures of Ku Klux Klan. He recognized that the enemy lies within."

"The Salon of French Artists is recognized as the most difficult in which to gain entrance of any of the several held there each year. That two Fresno girls and no less than eleven native Californians have presented specimens which the discriminating French critics considered worthy of acceptance, is a recognition of the highest standard of art in California never before accorded in Paris (3)."

"I remember reading not long ago in a San Francisco paper how the girls of this [...] American Girls' Art Club had astonished all Paris by taking long tramps and sketching expeditions into the woods of France unchaperoned. Astonished all Paris! Why Paris never even raises an eyebrow when we bold artists brave the dangers of her forests and suburbs all alone. As is a favorite custom of girls here, I have even sketched down along the Seine among the roughest class of workmen and tramps and was never more courteously treated anywhere (Burk 2008, 89-90)."

"Allow your heart's desire to be revealed, test your resilience, prioritize your values, and commit to the process. The rewards come while you're busy paving the path.""

"I recommend that others learn to identify their intuitive voice, and follow their muse. Get fearlessly involved in your own creative process, learn to love it, and don't get distracted by public opinion."

"I have come to realize that art is truly a universal language. For decades I’ve been creating “Peoplescapes,” oil, sculptured characters and applied objects on canvas, addressing cultural, political and spiritual issues facing society. By juxtaposing people in recognizable places and situations, each painting weaves together a story about contemporary life, filled with layers of detail, symbolism and humor."

"I have healed my deepest wounds by painting, writing music and singing. These activities have allowed me not only to express myself, but to sit with the painful issues, providing space, and enabling me to see with a broader perspective. Sometimes, I'm lucky enough to release the neurotic patterns and move through those tender areas. My twenty-six year relationship with my husband has been an anchor and has helped me grow. Marriage makes one accountable and reflects back whatever you're dishing out."

"I have suffered from insecurity, depression, and low self-esteem. I believe these are the symptoms of being raised by a bi-polar mother and father who did not make the effort to protect me. Also, being thrust in the modeling world at a very young age put unrealistic emphasis on my physicality, resulting in a food disorder. I've worked tirelessly to reverse my negative programming, rearrange my values, and accept myself with all my imperfections."

"I have developed a strong center through 30 years of yoga. I've grown aware of my weaknesses and strengths and regularly push myself to explore those boundaries. I am in touch with my fear and insecurity; while hearing those self-critical voices, I try not to act on these emotions any longer. Most of the time, I recognize these old reactions to pain and channel this self-knowledge into my art."

"As a child model from the age of five, with a bipolar stage mother, I was exposed to the superficial and manipulative world of objectification, filled with competition and exploitation."

"After my Tween modeling years, I started filling out, and my mother became my biggest critic. She always put me on diets and was obsessed with my appearance. My reaction was to become anorexic and bulimic. Once I realized the risks associated with this destructive behavior, I began to honestly evaluate the source of my self-loathing and finally concluded that the damage I was doing was to myself. By blaming my parents, and rebelling against everything else in my life, I was accepting a victim mentality. I could not ignore this revelation. I stopped purging and threw it all into my artwork, which has emotionally carried me for the last 30 years."

"I feel that creativity is a state of mind, and I try to bring that energy to everything I do. I love to paint, sing, play the piano, do yoga, take long walks with my husband, laugh daily and feed my friends. I've discovered that service to others is important, but not to the point of self-depletion, so balance and routine help to restore my energy."

"I've recently created a new technique I call "Plane- slashing" where I layer seemingly disparate paintings on stretched canvases, slash through them, and then work into the dimensions of canvas as a whole, sometimes adding sculpture and found objects. These are especially effective when I'm working through emotional upheavals."

"My creative process is a fluid and ongoing dance. Ideas come in a visual flash, and I often spend months manifesting that vision into a painting or sculpture. I allow my work to unfold naturally, without strict rules, often incorporating current events or addressing a subject I feel passionate about."

"I am a painter, author and singer-songwriter channeling my experiences and emotions through my creative disciplines. The love and commitment of my husband, creative partner and best friend inspires me to overcome my obstructions with grace and rationality."

"I have a new book entitled "Peoplescapes -- My Story From Purging To Painting" an illustrated memoir (Babu Books)."

"The pain in my life has pushed me to deep inspection of my inner workings, and steered me to create artwork with discipline. Once I discovered the transformative power of creativity, I realized that my contribution to the world is the body of work I've produced over my lifetime."

"My "Peoplescapes" (2D and 3D oil paintings, with sculpture, fabric, found objects on canvas) are detailed narratives addressing social, spiritual and political issues facing society. When I travel, I love to paint plein air and capture the beauty and light of the landscape."

"During World War II, Violet Oakley crafted twenty-four portable intended for American battleships, military bases, and airfields. While they seem conventional at first glance, a closer inspection uncovers distinct elements, such as the spirit’s victory over matter, which promises triumph and tranquility. With Oakley, art created by Christian Scientists matured. She demonstrated that illustrating Christian Science books is not essential to conveying the principles and spirit of the religion within the evolving realm of modern art."