A Quote by Robert Genn

Most of my contemporary grant-getters are now doing something other than painting. — © Robert Genn
Most of my contemporary grant-getters are now doing something other than painting.
Most actors will tell you they have some sort of dream of doing something other than what they're doing.
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.
I never noticed competing with other generations. There's competition within your own generation, but that competition is good. Maybe you're annoyed that somebody's getting more money than you are, but what's really annoying is if someone's painting a better painting than you're making. So it's something to think about and work toward and stay focused on.
I feel like what's most important for painting - which has been hierarchically on the top for a really long time in terms of what is considered fine art, by comparison with something like a comic book or what's considered low art - is that painting should open up laterally to include other cultures and things that don't immediately resonate as a painting but are obviously of equal contribution to the genre.
I am only interested in painting the actual person, in doing a painting of them, not in using them to some ulterior end of art. For me, to use someone doing something not native to them would be wrong.
One learns about painting by looking at and imitating other painters. I can't stress enough how important it is, if you are interested at all in painting, to look and to look a great deal at painting. There is no other way to find out about painting.
Movie acting is harder than doing a play. You have to be entertaining but completely natural, like Jimmy Stewart and Cary Grant. They weren't doing anything. Do you have any idea how hard that is? That's how good they were. It's crazy hard to be convincing and real. It's the most subtle, hardest thing there is.
To do a drawing for a painting most often means doing something very sketchy and schematic and then later making it polished.
I have ADD or something. Even when I am doing something, it's me on the computer, I'm painting and I'm writing music. I have to rotate what I'm doing every 15 minutes.
Doing something else and just adding whatever Pusha T nuances on it, now you're doing something cheaper. You started one place and took it to its heights, and now you're regressing. I don't think I should be exploring that right now.
For most of the movies that I've done, we've shot in a contemporary house, in contemporary clothes, speaking in a contemporary way. So, I really enjoy that. It really helps.
I like art that challenges you and makes a lot of people angry because they don't get it. Because they refuse to look at it properly. Rather than open their mind to the possibility of seeing something, they just resist. A lot of people think contemporary art makes them feel stupid. Because they are stupid. They're right. If you have contempt about contemporary art, you are stupid. You can be the most uneducated person in the world and completely appreciate contemporary art, because you see the rebellion. You see that it's trying to change things.
I think a good painting or a good work of art does many things it wants, I mean, maybe 15 or 20 or 100. One of the things a painting does is to make the room look better. It improves the wall that it's on. Which is much harder than it looks. And that's a good thing. And if one engages with a painting on that level, that's fine, that's great. After some time, familiarity, the other things that a painting does, the other layers, they just start to make themselves felt.
You usually want to get something out of a painting other than the ideas that you had in your head.
Acting is not about showing what you're feeling. It's about doing something. It's about what you're doing for the other person. Anything other than 'doing' is not grounded in the truth.
I go to contemporary galleries all around the world when I can. There's always something historical and something contemporary; those are my rock references.
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