A Quote by Gary Hume
Sometimes I can see the whole painting from the outset in my mind's eye. But more often than not, that idea doesn't last the duration of the painting. Sometimes it comes out easy, just as I had envisaged. But that is reasonably rare.
Related Quotes
I like painting because it's something I never come to the end of. Sometimes I paint a picture, then I paint it all out. Sometimes I'm working on fifteen or twenty pictures at the same time. I do that because I want to - because I like to change my mind so often. The thing to do is always to keep starting to paint, never finishing 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.
Sometimes you need to live with a painting for a while. Starting a painting can be easy, but finishing it... that's the skill of the painter, how you finally know when it's done.
Writing a short story is like painting a picture on the head of a pin. And just getting everything to fit is - sometimes seems impossible. Writing a novel, though, is - has its own challenges of scope. And I think of that as painting a mural, where the challenge is that if you are close enough to work on it, you're too close to see the whole thing.
The painting is always done very much with [the model's] co-operation. The problem with painting a nude, of course, is that it deepens the transaction. You can scrap a painting of someone's face and it imperils the sitter's self-esteem less than scrapping a painting of the whole naked body.
You have bits of canvas that are unpainted and you have these thick stretcher bars. So you see that a painting is an object; that it's not a window into something - you're not looking at a landscape, you're not looking at a portrait, but you're looking at a painting. It's basically: A painting is a painting is a painting. And it's what Frank Stella said famously: What you see is what you see.
Creation rather than painting, or if painting, yet such, and with such co-presence of the whole picture flash'd at once upon the eye, as the sun paints in a camera obscura. (Describing his poetic ideal, 1817)
When I am in a painting, I'm not aware of what I'm doing. It is only after a sort of 'get acquainted' period that I see what I have been about. I have no fears about making changes, destroying the image, etc, because the painting has a life of its own. I try to let it come through. It is only when I lose contact with the painting that the result is a mess. Otherwise there is pure harmony, an easy give and take, and the painting comes out well.
The interesting thing is that in everyday life, I fail to see the most ordinary things. I often stumble and sometimes I even fall over. But when I draw or look at a painting, I go into a sort of overdrive and just see things differently than other people.
Sometimes you look at a painting and certain parts are so beautiful. You say, "Wow, this is fantastic," but 10 minutes later you most likely have to kill it. Every painting wants to live. You want to build and bring this type of painting to the climax. When it's at the highest point, you want more. And then if you want more, you might destroy it. So you take a chance.
I have told myself a hundred times that painting - that is, the material thing called a painting - is no more than a pretext, the bridge between the mind of the painter and the mind of the spectator.
All that stuff about flatness - it's this idea that painting is a specialized discipline and that modernist painting increasingly refers to painting and is refining the laws of painting. But who cares about painting? What we care about is that the planet is heating up, species are disappearing, there's war, and there are beautiful girls here in Brooklyn on the avenue and there's food and flowers.
When I was painting in art school - and I think many painters in the 1980s worked similarly - a finished painting would often be constructed from lots of other paintings underneath. Some of these individual layers of painting were better than others, but that was something that you would often only realise retrospectively.
When HSBC took the painting out of their building, they had to block the road and use a crane to bring the painting out from the window. They spent about 20,000 dollars just to get the painting out of the building! They said not to bring it back, and told Sotheby's to sell it immediately!
Sometimes their oppression of emotion and the weird way it comes out is more interesting than painting it in bold primary colors.
Painting to me is addictive. These are moments when it is inspiring, but they are few and far between. I keep my tools sharpened for the moment when things do start clicking, but that doesn't happen a lot. I really have to push myself sometimes. Painting is a profession in which it is very easy to be lazy, particularly if you have any degree of success.
Related Authors
Ai Weiwei Quotes
Chinese
Artist
Andy Warhol Quotes
American
Artist
Claude Monet Quotes
French
Artist
David Hockney Quotes
English
Artist
Gerhard Richter Quotes
German
Artist
Henri Matisse Quotes
French
Artist
Kehinde Wiley Quotes
American
Artist
Leonardo da Vinci Quotes
Italian
Artist
Marcel Duchamp Quotes
French
Artist
Marina Abramovic Quotes
Serbian
Artist
Maurice Sendak Quotes
American
Artist
Michelangelo Quotes
Italian
Artist
Paul Cezanne Quotes
French
Artist
Robert Genn Quotes
Canadian
Artist
Robert Henri Quotes
American
Artist
Yoko Ono Quotes
American
Artist