A Quote by Aesop Rock

Drawing and visual arts was kinda my first passion going all the way back to when I was a kid. I always felt like it was what I was supposed to do - but in reality I don't know that I ever had the skill to make it a profession.
That's why I ended up going to Lancaster University, because they had a visual arts course, and in the first year it was like a broad visual arts course in sculpture, painting, graphics - all of that.
When I was really young, I gravitated towards the visual arts first. I feel that's what comes most naturally to me. I've always had an immediate proclivity towards making visual art and I was a really tactile kid.
There was this moment, particularly after I had my first child, where I felt like, 'I don't know if I'll ever make a record, or if this is always going to be something just floating around in my head.'
I felt like I had kind of played it out, and I wanted to see what was next, and then came Mythbusters. You know, it's the best job I've ever had, on its worst day it's better than anything else, but it's a huge amount of responsibility, and there are days when just going into work and building something from someone else's drawing sounds like going back to heaven.
When I was a kid, it was thought I would do something in the visual arts because I was always drawing, but when we emigrated to Australia from Holland when I was seven, I learnt the English language, and I fell in love with it.
I try to think of the songs as little movies. They're always pretty visual to me. I can always sort of see them. I don't always know what the end result is going to be, and I don't know exactly what it's going to sound like, but I can kinda see them.
I haven't had the opportunity to study visual art, but it was always my first love when it came to artistic expression. I started drawing and experimenting with visual art when I was 5.
As far as trying to make it terms of social hierarchy or status and all that in art and music - I've always felt that that stuff was bullshit. It's got very little to do with reality, and reality is where things live. You look at a painting and think, "Oh, it's beautiful. It inspires me," whatever. But it's never going to inspire you like reality. A lot of these artists and musicians who prioritize skill over experience, they sit around masturbating themselves over knowledge and intellect rather than just going to a place.
I'm so opposite of my profession. No one - particularly my mother and father - ever thought I was going to be a boxer because I always felt that football and baseball were too dangerous. I was just such a quiet kid.
This is an important distinction, because most of the modern philosophies that deny that we can know reality, and ultimately truth, make the mistake of constructing epistemological systems to explain how we know reality without first acknowledging the fact that we do know reality. After they begin within the mind and find they can't construct a bridge to reality, they then declare that we can't know reality. It is like drawing a faulty road map before looking at the roads, then declaring that we can't know how to get from Chicago to New York!
I studied graphic design originally. I used to like drawing, and I was quite into technical drawing. I was always interested in the visual medium, but I thought I was going to be an architect or something like that, but it's quite a lonely job.
I was always into film, but theater was my entry point. I always felt like film didn't make sense to me as a kid. It was just so magical that I was like, 'There's something going on back there that I don't know.' But, when I watched theater, it was something that was happening in front of me.
Passion is what convinced armies that had no chance to win - it's believing that something can happen. Reality is what you make it to be. And when you're the only one who can see the way the future is going to be, you can be the tool that bends, rips, shapes and paints the future the way you want it to be. That's true passion!
Music's supposed to come from the heart. I felt like that if it ever got mechanical, I was going to back away from it.
I know you only get one chance to make a first impression in a city - and I was so disappointed in myself for how that first season in New York had gone. It felt like a blown opportunity. It felt like I'd cemented my reputation in the opposite way that I'd wanted to. Selfish. Not a leader. Not a winning player.
I felt I really wanted to back off from music completely and just work within the visual arts in some way. I started painting quite passionately at that time.
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