If you look at the paintings that I love in art history, these are the paintings where great, powerful men are being celebrated on the big walls of museums throughout the world. What feels really strange is not to be able to see a reflection of myself in that world.
I enjoy thinking about how paintings can change depending on where they are - how they look in a gallery or in relation to other paintings, or in different rooms. Paintings can change the way we experience and see the world.
People are still making paintings. People are still enjoying paintings, looking at paintings. Paintings still have something to tell us. There's a way of being in the world that painting brings to us, that painters bring to the task that we absorb and are able to be in dialogue with. That's something that's part of us.
The more I've gotten interested in writing about history and making sense of myself within the continuum of history, the more I've turned to paintings, to art. I look to the imagery of art to help me understand something about my own place in the world.
I love to draw-pencil, ink pen-I love art. When I go on tour and visit museums in Holland, Germany or England-you know those huge paintings?-I'm just amazed. You don't think a painter could do something like that. I can look at a piece of sculpture or a painting and totally lose myself in it.
I think that people tend to look at the paintings as being resolved or finite. But, to me, a painting can be an index for all of the paintings I've done and all of the paintings I'm going to do. It's like if I'm doing a film of the Olympics, I'm not examining a specific sport; I'm interested in the overall context.
Each painting is its own world, but a lot of times I do see the paintings as one page from a story. You can imagine what has happened before or after. Sometimes they are worded as being a part of a story, especially the paintings where characters are in conversation.
I always liked paintings to be walls rather than windows. When we see a painting on a wall, it's a window, so I often put my paintings in the middle of the space to make a wall.
I am a famous artist. I make millions. But I frequently see debut shows of unknown artists with prices that are double of mine... what they're really doing is barely getting by and helping me sell 1,000 paintings a year effortlessly, because they make my paintings look like such a bargain. Thank you to all the egotistical art students!
I'm just really impressed by oil paintings - I don't see how people do it! That's the style I like: classic oil paintings. Abstract art just isn't my thing.
If a film is good, and I'm sort of able to sit there and absorb myself within that world. And get lost. That is a pretty powerful tool. And there's not many paintings out there, that make me want to stare at it for hours at a time, and wonder where I am!
In Germany, we often hear the absurd complaint that museums don't have the money to buy paintings. Of course, I'm not talking about me and my paintings. There are, after all, more popular painters in this country.
By and large, most of the work that we see in the great museums throughout the world are populated with people who don't happen to look like me.
I have been brought up around art. Even now, when I travel, I love going to museums and spend hours in front of paintings. Art is like oxygen for me. That's what I miss in Bombay.
Unlike the background in many of the paintings that I was inspired by or paintings that I borrowed poses from - the great European paintings of the past - the background in my work does not play a passive role.
The heaping together of paintings by Old Masters in museums is a catastrophe; likewise, a collection of a hundred Great Brains makes one big fathead.
Kinkade's paintings are worthless schmaltz, and the lamestream media that love him are wrong. However, I'd love to see a museum mount a small show of Kinkade's work. I would like the art world and the wider world to argue about him in public, out in the open.