Top 71 Quotes & Sayings by Julian Schnabel
Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American artist Julian Schnabel.
Last updated on November 25, 2024.
I didn't want to be like everybody else. Art was my religion.
Some people must go to extremes to get the world in balance for themselves. Some can't bear bright lights, so wherever they go they search for the dark; they turn the lights down, anything to sustain some level of comfort.
There's been too much attention on marketing. Can't we just talk about the paintings?
Because I'm not doing it for the money, I'm doing it because I feel like that story needs to be told or clarified, or something needs to be shown about that.
It's a great excuse and luxury, having a job and blaming it for your inability to do your own art. When you don't have to work, you are left with the horror of facing your own lack of imagination and your own emptiness. A devastating possibility when finally time is your own.
I'm not saying I'm the only Jewish person who cares about Palestinian people, but unfortunately, their voices are not necessarily heard as loudly as they should be.
If I hung one of my paintings next to someone else's, I knew mine would kind of pop off the wall.
I wanted to make pictures where you would not know who took them. I also bring the present into the past.
You know, painting has given me a lot of freedom, because for some reason, I've been able to paint things, organize things in a way that I see that don't have any buffers or compromises in them.
My early paintings weren't that good - I was very influenced by Francis Bacon. But there was a kind of intensity there. And however influenced they may have been by other people, even my earliest paintings were recognisably my own.
I never paid much attention to being Jewish when I was a kid. In fact, I'd say my religion was more surfing than Judaism - that's what I spent most of my time doing.
I've never made a movie to make money. I've never made a painting to make money.
I think when somebody's painting they don't necessarily... I'm not illustrating what I know. I'm mapping out, like topographically, some terrain I am satisfied with, how awkward that mark is.
It's very difficult, I think, for people to be around you when you're getting lots of attention. It's very difficult for young people to understand what that's about when people start treating you differently when you've been doing the same thing you were doing the day before.
I guess I am ruthless too because that's what makes a great artist. But I also respect people, I don't go around stepping on their heads.
My compulsion is to create things.
I think that truth is stranger than fiction, and it's nice to know the people you're making a movie about.
Traditionally, photography is supposed to capture an event that has passed; but that is not what I'm looking for. Photography brings the past into the present when you look at it.
This camera works like photosynthesis. It is as if you were Xeroxing your own face. The pictures have such physicality: their surface is like fine leather, stained from chemicals. Each one has a body and is more than an image.
There were some types of sanctions that happen in the public world that made my work acceptable, where someone looks at the paintings and they don't - they may go, "okay," and then look at it in a different sort of way. Instead of just looking at it as some type of wild art, they look at it in a historical perspective or context.
Painting is like breathing to me. It’s what I do all the time. Every day I make art, whether it is painting, writing or making a movie.
When art is really great, it's really powerful, can really do something to you, make you feel more alive and make you feel more connected to something. If you don't feel like that when you do it, and you just make a movie to make money, that would be pretty boring to me. I just wouldn't do it. That would be like sitting in an office, which I don't want to do.
I think people have problems sometimes when things are too general. In fact, they are not really general at all.
Making a painting is like playing the saxophone. You hit the note and it comes out.
I don't think the meaning in my paintings comes from just using broken dishes.
I think beauty is a feeling that you get after you've had an experience. It's the way you feel about it that is beautiful.
We need to not be scared [of muslim], but understand each other. When you're around these people, you see they have much more in common than their differences.
I don't know if I could, like, see a face and know what the face of beauty looks like, but after I've seen it I know if I've felt like it was beauty.
I work with things left over from other things.
Everything I've seen becomes real once it becomes memory. The films I've seen are interchangeable with things that have really happened to me.
Traditionally, photography is supposed to capture an event that has passed; but that is not what I'm looking for. Photography brings the past into the present when you look at it...
I think it's good when people don't write good things about your work. I mean, what a great compliment it is to be called a charlatan.
It's nice to see your name in print. It's interesting.
Can I find a poetic that can be subversive enough to grab people in some subliminal way, to where they feel that they are altered and have had an experience that belonged to them?
I think basically I'm a painter, but I would use anything to make my point.
I do dream about art, and images come to me in dreams. I am definitely hoping to be in touch with my subconscious. I expect a call any minute.
In a certain way, my work had set me up to be against lots of things. If there wasn't some sort of sanction for it in the public world, it might have been...it wouldn't have been tolerated, because people don't want things to get shaken up.
Paintings are not like the Internet. They're not like movies. They're not electronic-friendly. You have to go see them. You have to stand in front of them. That's the great thing about them.
Sometimes my kids might tell me they had a dream or and maybe I'll paint some paintings from their dream. That's one good thing you get from your kids. Rob them of their dreams.
I like when people get really close to the paintings, when they can't really get away from them, I like them to operate in that way on the viewer.
I think, basically, I'm an abstract artist. I just think that that's not even an issue. I think everything's abstract.
What's interesting about making art is that you take everything you know about it and you bring it up to that point, and you start making a physical thing that addresses what that is. And when you do it, you don't know anything about it - if it's going to work or not work.
Some people might think that the paintings are involved with a mythic - not just subject matter - but a certain sort of physical space that the paintings occupy...like personages.
When I'm making a movie, I don't like to know what's going to happen next. I like to watch something and be surprised all the time, and just not know, and let it take me wherever.
I'm not mannerist. I don't think I'm interested in mannerism. If I ever use it in a way, or if manner is like some kind of product of certain sorts of usage of different kinds of materials, then it's about involution or turning in on that.
I see paintings everywhere. I look at stuff and it looks like painting to me.
It doesn't matter what I think I am, it matters what I do.
I think it's your own ghost, seeing the work and just thinking if it will be okay to leave that around.
I want the paintings to take me or the viewer out somewhere else.
When I made my first film, Basquiat, I think one of the criticisms was that the way I work is episodic. Later, as people started to look at the movies, they started to realize that maybe that's my style. If I could do it better or another way, I guess I would.
I have a completely romantic idea about making paintings, I guess.
Maybe my work looks a little crazy, a little insane, but I don't really see myself as a crazy artist or a shaman artist.
I don't think my paintings are self-conscious but you feel the consciousness of them. Without them being self-conscious.
I think style is a fringe benefit that looks like you made it.
I wanted to show painting paintings first, then the plate paintings; now I can show that I've sort of freed myself from stylistic inhibitions.
Many people say to me, "I saw [Miral] and it really stayed with me. I woke up the next day and really thought about it, and have been thinking about it for awhile." That was my goal.
I was always very... impatient about showing my paintings to people.
A lot of what I do is about being in the moment and I think that's hard for people to get. I like it when things suddenly affect the painting. I mix up this red and it affects the whole painting or this little bit of white falls down there, and something changes the whole nature of the thing. The residue on what happens, that's what's in the paintings.
I don't think people are terribly interested in young artists who were doing interesting thing, but I don't think people are terribly interested in young artists.
I think not knowing what to think of your paintings is a good place to be.
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