Painters From The United States

"My mother's kiss made me a painter."

"I too wonder about the attraction of Santa Fe, but damn it, it has something. I have had touches of nostalgia several times. Perhaps it is the sunlight, but there is no question about the fact that there is a great pull. I am more inclined to believe that it is the stimulation of the extremes — in every direction — that we experience there which we miss when away from it."

"At long last, marking the ninetieth anniversary of the Armistice, an American poet takes his place in the front rank of the War Poet's parade."

"Light enough now to watch the trees go by— a sleep like sickness in the rattling train. Men's bodies joggle on the opposite seat and tired greasy faces half awake stir restlessly and breathe a stagnant sigh. The stale air thickens on the grimy pane reeking of musty smoke and woolly feet. Versailles—a bridge of shadow on a lake dawn-blue and pale, the color of the sky. Paris at last!—and a great joy like pain in my heart. We scuffle down the corridor. "Lieutenant." "Sir." "In half an hour we meet at another station—your orders are to take these men by subway to the Gare du Nord.""

"We talk about how diversity will open up new possibilities, and she’s a prime example of that. She thinks of stuff that no one has done and does it—pulls it off."

"Now, most astronomers hate dust; dust can dim the light from background stars and galaxies that we're trying to observe. But I love dust. Stellar nurseries are dusty. And we can use our knowledge of dust to understand the structure of molecular clouds. Stellar nurseries are threaded by these long, dense noodlelike structures called filaments. Embedded within filaments are these compact knots of gas called cores — the final stage before star formation."

"... part of the challenge with astronomy is that images are inherently flat... 3-D models uniquely tap into the human brain’s ability to detect patterns. And so that was the idea behind the 3D printing was to have a new way of visualizing stellar nurseries — visual."

"The link between art and science for me is my love of color and my love of light."

"We can never make assumptions about the entire universe based on what’s happening in our own backyard...we don’t want to have a theory of star formation just for the Milky Way — we want a universal theory."

"It’s frustrating for me, when people just talk about things at a superficial level and then try to solve the problem through diversity programs."

"We know that molecular clouds are elaborate, and that their complex geometry is tied to star formation. But the images we have of them are flat — they’re inherently two-dimensional."

"Everyone’s captivated by astronomy, by the stars, what’s out there in the universe...And so I made a conscious choice a long time ago that I wanted to share my work with the community, with Black folks and other people of color, especially."

"Astronomers are experts on understanding what light is. We can’t touch or sense most of the objects that we study, other than from the light that we receive from them."

"One strong motivation [for painting portraits] has been wanting to portray Black people in all the beauty that I see in them...I take a lot of joy in that."

"Imagination is a huge part of what it means to do science, and I often imagine what it would be like to be up close to these environments."

"It’s the strangeness of the universe that has always been my favorite part of physics."

"I paint mostly black people because I am black...I think it’s a cultural crisis in America, how people see themselves, and I think that should be an ambition in any art form to uplift people in some way."

"Astronomers are masters of light; light we can see and most of which we can’t see."

"Pursue your love. Stay hopeful. You’re needed. (Responding to the question "If there was a word you could give to other young people of color who want to be scientists, what would you tell them?")"

"Love is the ultimate thing, I want that to be the connection between everything I do: science, art, or otherwise."

"I grew up in an environment where love for my people and for our culture was expressed all around me. I was raised to identify with Black people around the globe."

"My work is very much about being in the city. It's very much about the streets and the buildings and the feeling of enclosure. And in that sense New York is very conceptual. I'm not an intellectual, not by any means. I admire those minds very much. But New York is about enclosure and the energy of enclosure, and has a kind of a tough irony. I mean, it's a city of complete contrasts and some bitterness, conflict, anger, and it's also a … place of enormous hope."

"Everything I have done and experienced gets into the work somehow or another—my childhood, my family life, my grad-school days."

"Everything comes from drawing out my ideas."

"Things Fall Apart."

"Popular culture is one part of teeming life that everybody, all of us, are involved in,"

"The book is the clearest, most forceful statement on art by an artist of our time that I have read."

"I think that one of the great virtues of the university lies in its being a community in the fullest sense of the word, a place of residence, and at the same time one of personal affirmation and intellectual rapport."

"It [art] communicates directly without asking approval of any authority. Its values are not those of set virtues, but are of the essential nature of man, good or bad. Art is one of the few media of expression which still remains unedited, unprocessed, and undictated. If its hazards are great, so are its potentialities magnificent."

"There are, roughly, about three conditions that seem to be basic in the artist's equipment: to be cultured, to be educated, and to be integrated."

"Today's conformity is, more than anything else, the retreat from controversiality. Tomorrow's art, if it is to be at all stirring, will no doubt be performed upon today's forbidden territory."

"Conformity is a mood and an atmosphere, a failure of hope or belief or rebellion."

"it is always in the future that the course of art lies"

"I have always held a notion of a healthy society as one in which the two opposing elements, the conservative and the creative (or radical, or visionary, or whatever term is best applied to the dissident), exist in a mutual balance. The conservative, with its vested interest in things as they are, holds onto the present, gives stability, and preserves established values (and keeps the banks open). The visionary, always able to see the configuration of the future in present things, presses for change, experiment, the venture into new ways. A truly creative artist is inevitably of this part of the society."

"each of them [artists] stands out as an island of civilized feeling in an ocean of corruption. Civilization has freely vindicated them in everything but their nonconformity."

"Nonconformity is the basic pre-condition of art, as it is the pre-condition of good thinking and therefore of growth and greatness in a people. The degree of nonconformity present-and tolerated-in a society might be looked upon as a symptom of its state of health."

"What is it about us, the public, and what is it about conformity itself that causes us all to require it of our neighbors and of our artists and then, with consummate fickleness, to forget those who fall into line and eternally celebrate those who do not?"

"Whoever would know his day or would capture its essential character must maintain such a degree of detachment."

"However glorious the history of art, the history of artists is quite another matter. And in any well-ordered household the very thought that one of the young may turn out to be an artist can be a cause for general alarm. It may be a point of great pride to have a Van Gogh on the living room wall, but the prospect of having Van Gogh himself in the living room would put a good many devoted art lovers to rout."

"The artist occupies a unique position vis-à-vis the society in which he lives. However dependent upon it he may be for his livelihood, he is still somewhat removed from its immediate struggles for social status or for economic supremacy. He has no really vested interest in the status quo. The only vested interest-or one might say, professional concern-which he does have in the present way of things rests in his ability to observe them, to assimilate the multifarious details of reality, to form some intelligent opinion about the society or at least an opinion consistent with his temperament. That being the case, he must maintain an attitude at once detached and deeply involved."

"I would not ordinarily undertake a discussion of form in art, nor would I undertake a discussion of content. To me, they are inseparable. Form is formulation-the turning of content into a material entity, rendering a content accessible to others, giving it permanence, willing it to the race. Form is as varied as are the accidental meetings of nature. Form in art is as varied as idea itself. It is the visible shape of all man's growth; it is the living picture of his tribe at its most primitive, and of his civilization at its most sophisticated state. Form is the many faces of the legend-bardic, epic, sculptural, musical, pictorial, architectural; it is the infinite images of religion; it is the expression and the remnant of self. Form is the very shape of content."

"I am a painter; I am not a lecturer about art nor a scholar of art. It is my chosen role to paint pictures, not to talk about them."

"I think that it can be said with certainty that the form which does emerge cannot be greater than the content which went into it. For form is only the manifestation, the shape of content."

"In art, the conservative is the vigorous custodian of the artistic treasures of a civilization, of its established values and its tastes-those of the past and even those present ones which have become accepted. Without the conservative we would know little of the circumstances of past art; we would have lost much of its meaning; in fact, we would probably have lost most of the art itself. However greatly the creative artist may chafe at entrenched conservatism, it is still quite true that his own work is both sustained and enriched by it."

"One's education naturally begins at the cradle. But it may perfectly well begin at a later time too. Be born poor... or be born rich... it really doesn't matter. Art is only amplified by such diversity."

"There is a cliché that the artist is the person who best reflects his time. I am not ready to accept that definition of the artist, nor the idea that the art is best which best reflects its time. The function of the artist is a little more than to reflect; he has to refract, to set things off in another direction."

"I believe that the image I create must contain within it everything man concerns himself with: his hopes, his fears, his tears. And I find that a great deal of the imagery in use today precludes most of these concerns."

"Every artist would like to communicate, but often he fails to ask himself with whom he is trying to do it."

"I think the term "self-expression" ought to be forbidden. It's finished. A person, if he has a gram of honesty, naturally does nothing but express himself. Self-expression is as much part of the artist as teeth are to the dentist; it is part of his life, his work."

"I believe that there is no kind of experience which has not its potential visual dimension or its latent meanings for literary or other expression. Know all you can mathematics, physics, economies, and particularly history. As part of the whole education, the teaching of the university is therefore of profoundest value."