A Quote by Conor O'Brien
When I am recording on my own, it's like an oil painting: I can put that on top of that and build up layers. But with the band, it turned out more watercolor: you're leaving white bits of paper exposed, so that nothing is too overworked.
Related Quotes
If London is a watercolor, New York is an oil painting.
I'd rather lose large than win slightly. I think life is an oil painting, not a watercolor.
I have an idea of a set of colors and see what I have. A lot of things, the best, more magical things in the paintings just sort of happen. They aren't things I thought of in advance. They are more things I am given. What paint does, in watercolor more than oil but it happens in oil too, are things one never expects if you work freely. I suppose I learned a lot coming to this after years of playing improvisational music. I have to trust my intuition and I work in the moment, when that moment seems to be happening. And to leave it alone when it is not.
There is enough material in the Kuiper Belt to build anything out there. We could gobble up all the little asteroids, filtering out all the volatile materials, leaving us with bits of rock and using that to make some incredible structures.
Several years ago we had an intern who was none too swift. One day he was typing and turned to a secretary and said, "I'm almost out of typing paper. What do I do?" "Just use copier machine paper," she told him. With that, the intern took his last remaining blank piece of paper, put it on the photocopier and proceeded to make five blank copies.
The media ... is like an oil painting. Close up, it looks like nothing on Earth. Stand back and you get the drift.
I put some songs on the Internet back in 2009 - that's kind of how everything started with Washed Out. I had never really planned on being in a band or anything like that. It was kind of a hobby I did on my own, just recording music.
I like to bring a certain sense of humanity and detail to my work, and watercolor allows me to do that. I have fascination and wonder about the line and transparent quality or properties in watercolor. I use watercolor to give voice to what I would like to talk about.
We struggle against easel painting not because it is an aesthetic form of painting, but because it is not modern, for it does not succeed in bringing out the technical side, it is a redundant, exclusive art, and cannot be of any use to the masses. Hence we are struggling not against painting but against photography carried out as if it were an etching, a drawing, a picture in sepia or watercolor.
Sometimes when I do an overdub solo, they'll keep four or five of my attempts and then mix the bits that they like to make a solo up out of them. It's not against the rules, really - I can learn my own solos, then. But that's the whole beauty of multi-track recording, isn't it?
Going to America increased the build up on me, especially as the war was going on there. In a way we'd turned out to be a Trojan horse. The 'Fab Four' moved right to the top and then sang about drugs and sex and then I got into more and more heavy stuff and that's when they started dropping us.
In 1915 Sophie Tauber and I carried out our first works in the simplest forms, using painting, embroidery and pasted paper (without using oil colors to avoid any reference with usual painting). These were probably the first manifestations of their kind, pictures that were their own reality, without meaning or cerebral intention. We rejected everything in the nature of a copy or a description, in order to give free flow to what was elemental and spontaneous.
If I have any advice to anybody it's this: take up watercolor painting.
Realist painting has to do with leaving out a lot of detail. I think my painting can be a little shocking in all that it leaves out. But what happens is that the mind fills in what's missing . . . Painting is a way of making you see what I saw.
If you look at the end of a roll of toilet paper, like the brown paper tube, I basically worked in a factory that made humongous ones like that - for concrete or anything you wanted to put in there. I was the guy who chopped those up into smaller pieces, put them in a box, throw it in a pallet, wrap it up, jump in a forklift and put it on a truck.
Whether a watercolor is inferior to an oil [painting], or whether a drawing, an etching, or a photograph is not as important as either, is inconsequent. To have to despise something in order to respect something else is a sign of impotence.
