A Quote by Trevor Paglen
It's productive and fun to try interpreting cave paintings, but ultimately, they can't teach us anything beyond what we imagine them to be.
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Do cave paintings mean anything? Not really, but I, for one, am happy to have them.
The earliest paintings I loved were always the most non-referential paintings you can imagine, by painters such as Mondrian. I was thrilled by them because they didn't refer to anything else. They stood alone, and they were just charged magic objects that did not get their strength from being connected to anything else.
My father was a very fun dad; he was always coaching our soccer sports teams, he made sure that we had activities to do. He was kind of goofy and fun. But at the same time, he had a lot of lessons to teach us so that we didn't grow up and just not be good people. I try and reflect a lot on how I was raised by my father in the character that I'm playing now in being a dad. You've got to be strong for these kids. You also have to be fun and teach them all the lessons, not just one, or two, or three.
Modern language must be older than the cave paintings and cave engravings and cave sculptures and dance steps in the soft clay in the caves in Western Europe, in the Aurignacian Period some 35,000 years ago, or earlier. I can't believe they did all those things and didn't also have a modern language.
I try not to listen to the shoulds or coulds, and try to get beyond expectations, peer pressure, or trying to please - and just listen. I believe all the answers are ultimately within us.
Imagine craving absolutely nothing from the world. Imagine cutting the invisible strings that so painfully bind us: what would that be like? Imagine the freedoms that come from the ability to enjoy things without having to acquire them, own them, possess them. Try to envision a relationship based on acceptance and genuine care rather than expectation. Imagine feeling completely satisfied and content with your life just as it is. Who wouldn't want this? This is the enjoyment of non-attachment.
There are worlds beyond anything you can imagine; there are joys beyond anything you have experienced. There are ecstasies that are undreamed of, I assure you.
I care very much about all of my characters, recurring or not. I try to imagine something about that person beyond his or her physical appearance. After creating them, part of my job is to inhabit them and try to see their world from their perspective.
I have fun. I always have fun. I don't really get in a hurry about anything. I just try to go with the flow and have fun, and that's how I try to play baseball.
Imagine a world in which we saw beyond the lines that divide us, and celebrated our differences, instead of hiding from them. Imagine a world in which we finally recognized that, fundamentally, we are all the same. And imagine if we allowed that new understanding to build relations between people and between nations.
Literature is love. I think it went like this: drawings in the cave, sounds in the cave, songs in the cave, songs about us. Later, stories about us.
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.
Obviously, you want to teach your child between right and wrong, respect and being kind to others, whether it's their sisters or parents. You try to teach them by example, talk to them and explain certain situations. But there's also a time to put them in time out or let them know they've made a mistake and try to learn from it.
Chris Ofili's suave, stippled, visually tricked-out paintings of the nineties, with their allover fields of shimmering dots and clumps of dung, are like cave paintings of modern life. They crackle with optical cockiness, love, and massive amounts of painterly mojo.
If aught can teach us aught, Affliction's looks,
Making us pry into ourselves so, near,
Teach us to know ourselves, beyond all books,
Or all the learned schools that ever were.
Modern paintings often seem to have been made quickly, by comparison with the paintings of earlier centuries, and that seems to give us the license to look at them quickly - to consume them and move on.
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