My idea is to paint paintings so that when you walk into a room, I'm pulling you in, or that makes you suddenly stop and wonder: 'What is this? There is something groovy, something else going on here.' Also, I want to give you what is obvious and what is not obvious to the eye.
I often make the mistake of thinking that something that is obvious to me is obvious to everyone else.
People in the arts often want to aim for the biggest, most obvious target, and hit it smack in the bull’s eye.
Of course with everybody else aiming there as well that makes it very hard and expensive to hit. I prefer to shoot the arrow, then paint the target around it. You make the niches in which you finally reside.
The obvious choice isn't always the best choice, but sometimes, by golly, it is. I don't stop looking as soon I find an obvious answer, but if I go on looking, and the obvious-seeming answer still seems obvious, I don't feel guilty about keeping it.
Don't concentrate on the obvious. They might want you to miss something else.
I guess one that wouldn't be obvious is - well, maybe it's super obvious, I can't tell - 'I Love Lucy' is my favorite show, going back to when I was 4. I've watched every episode I don't know how many times. It was something to watch women being funny when I was young.
You don't want to be the smartest person in the room; you want to be the dumbest in the room. You want to be surrounded by other thinking people who are going to say something that makes you think, "Oh, my God, that's an amazing idea. Why didn't I think of that."
I have a studio in the country - in the woods - but my paintings look more real to me than what is outdoors. You walk outside; the rocks are inert; even the clouds are inert. It makes me feel a little better. But I do have a faith that it is possible to make a living thing, not a diagram of what I have been thinking: to posit with paint something living, something that changes each day.
It was kind of obvious to everyone around me that I wasn't going to stay in the town I grew up in - I knew I had a dream of becoming something else.
I don't paint over my paintings with black paint. I paint black paintings. It isn't because I'm sad, just as I didn't paint red paintings yesterday because I was happy. Nor will I paint yellow paintings tomorrow because I'm jealous.
It's always obvious to me when someone is looking at me with an idea of who I am and hoping that that's the person I'm going to be. No matter how subtle it is, it's there, and you want to give them who they really want. But it ain't me.
It is shocking that young people should be addling their brains over mere logical subtleties in Euclid's Elements, trying to understand the proof of one obvious fact in terms of something equally .. obvious.
I deal with the obvious. I present, reiterate, and glorify the obvious - because the obvious is what people need to be told.
It's weird doing a show on a Saturday, because we get the news after everybody had their way with it. We still have to find a way to get something fresh out of the story, but also keep the integrity of it. A lot of times the obvious take is so obvious it's already been on Twitter, so we gotta find a new thing.
I think it's been obvious from the beginning that my projects are not going to be something that people already have in mind. You can't be thinking about such things when you create something.
Success is the study of the obvious. Everyone should take Obvious 1 and Obvious 2 in school.
I didn't think I was good at anything, didn't do well in school. And then in the third grade, I was going to a public school. And the teacher was putting math problems on the board. And I said to myself - it's amazing how you can remember certain incidents at any age that made an impression - I asked myself why is she putting those up when the answers are obvious. And then I saw it wasn't obvious to anybody else in the class. So I said, "Hey, I'm good at something."