A Quote by Robert Henri
To paint is to know how to put nothing on canvas, and have it look like something when you stand back.
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Sometimes I scrape off a lot. You have on the floor, like cow dung in the field, this big glob of paint... and it's just a lot of inert matter, inert paint. Then I look back at the canvas, and it's not inert - it's active, moving and living.
Being behind the camera you have control; you have the ability to make decisions for characters, for where the story line's going to go, how you want to put it out there, how you want to edit it. Acting is like where you paint on the canvas, and being behind the camera is like being either the paint or the paintbrush. They're both a part of the creative process, it's just that they have two different functions.
I think we're all born with this huge canvas in front of us and the paintbrushes and the paint, and we choose what to put on this canvas.
You'd never look at a Rembrandt and say, 'That's just wood and canvas and paint - how much?!' It's all about how many people want it. It works on a pair of jeans as well - they're just material and stitching, and as soon as you walk out of the shop, they're worth nothing.
You just don't know when you get all the paint across the canvas how it will turn out. When you step back after you've finished, you say, 'This one is not so good. This one is good.'
Someone has asked me to paint Biblical pictures, and I say no, I'll not paint something that we know nothing about, might just as well paint something that will happen two thousand years hence.
When I put my brush to canvas, I never know what I'm going to paint. It's like when you're walking down the street with your hands in your pockets, humming a tune, you don't know what you'll be humming five minutes from now.
My belief is that it is most important for an artist to develop an approach and philosophy about life - if he has developed this philosophy, he does not put paint on canvas, he puts himself on canvas.
I'd paint long strips of canvas and abandon them on the beach, or put bread out in geometric patterns for the pigeons downtown. I wanted people to find something nice and intriguing to puzzle over. Then I'd go back to see if the things were still there, or if anyone would notice.
Creative innovation requires knowing something. You can't just be a monkey throwing paint on a canvas. It's the 10,000-hour rule: You need to know something well enough to make something new.
In teaching color, you teach people how to look something and see the tone in it and break it down to be able to paint it and reproduce that color. But then, I'm psychedelic, so I look at color differently. I like colors that are in contrast with one another, so that they flicker back and forth.
You know when you take the paint off an old canvas and you discover that something's been painted underneath it? That's what I feel like - that part of the old is coming through the new.
I paint on the ground. I paint with sticks, with big paint cans, and whatever else falls in it. Basically, what I'm doing is capturing unbridled emotion and putting it on canvas. It's like capturing lightning in a bottle.
It is for the artist... in portrait painting to put on canvas something more than the face the model wears for that one day; to paint the man, in short, as well as his features.
Life in itself is an empty canvas; it becomes whatsoever you paint on it. You can paint misery, you can paint bliss. This freedom is your glory.
No one would want to pay a penny for an empty canvas by me. But it would be quite another if the empty canvas were signed by a great artist. I would be surprised if an empty canvas by Picasso or Matisse signed and inscribed with the words, 'I wanted to paint such and such on this canvas, but did not do so,' would not fetch thousands... After all, with an empty canvas, the possibilities are limitless, and so perhaps is the cash.
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