When we talk about contemporary art and contemporary artists, we usually imagine artists who are alive. But I feel very uncomfortable about placing a border between living artists and dead artists.
The artists could be dead, but some of them are not so distant from us, and make us feel as if they are alive with us. Such artists are worth calling "contemporary artists".
Comic artists have always been part of my social circle. I just like hanging out with artists, and I always see them at conventions or a store signing or something. "Hey, we should do something together."
I feel like there are comic book artists who are comic book artists, and then there's comic book artists who are cartoonists.
The only artists I have ever known who are personally delightful are bad artists. Good artists exist simply in what they make, and consequently are perfectly uninteresting in what they are.
Savages and modern artists are alike strangely driven to create something uglier than themselves. but the artists find it harder.
The best artists are people who don't consider themselves artists, and the people who do are usually the most pretentious and annoying. They've got their priorities wrong. They're just doing it to be artists rather than because they want to do it.
Artists are those people who sit at the intersection between the known and unknown, the rational and irrational, coming to terms with some of the confusing histories we, as artists, deal with.
Some artists leave remarkable things which, a 100 years later, don't work at all. I have left my mark; my work is hung in museums, but maybe one day the Tate Gallery or the other museums will banish me to the cellar... you never know.
Indeed, artists, particularly modern artists, have intentionally limited the scope and vocabulary of their expression to convey, as Mark Rothko and Ad Reinhardt do, the most essential, even spiritual, ideas of their art.
Few contemporary artists mined the space between the ordinary and the strange better than Orozco did.
Kerry James Marshall especially was a huge influence on me in graduate school, as were Wangechi Mutu and Julie Mehretu. These artists are titans. My education was also very much in comic books, so I've been going to comic book events in New York and have met a few artists there.
When artists find other artists that they love to work with, they more than likely will continue to work with them throughout their career.
I would love to see more dialogue around the "responsibilities" of art consumers - how can audiences better financially support artists we love, artists who are doing the work, so that artists have a more solid foundation upon which to make art?
I've worked with jazz artists, country artists, classical artists, pop artists. I never wanted there to be categories, because when I was a kid there weren't.
People who are artists professionally are not artists because they want to be artists; they have to be artists. They're compelled to get that creativity out and to share that with others.