A Quote by William Wegman

My background is in painting but in school in the sixties, like many artists of that time, I believed that painting was dead. I began to work in collaboration with other artists in the creation of performances and installation works. Soon after, I started making video and photographic works and in the process became fascinated with the media itself. Before long I was setting things up just for the camera. In l970 I got a dog and he turned out to be very interested in video and photography as well.
I was always interested in drawing and painting. I enrolled in college to study painting. But I didn't have any livelihood when I graduated. My mother died very young, and I didn't have any home, so I had to find a way to earn a living. It seemed to me that photography - to the great disappointment, I have to say, of my painting teacher - could offer that. So I went and did a degree in photography, and then after that I could go out and get paid for work. For portraits, things like that.
I think we seem to remember things in still pictures. I never gave up on painting. When they said painting was dead, I just thought, Well, that's all about photography, and photography's not that interesting, and it's changing anyway.
I attended the High School of Industrial Arts and studied with many great artists as painting is something that you never stop learning about. Actually, in high school there was a time that I was thinking about just concentrating on painting and I asked my music teacher, Mr. Sondberg, for advice and he encouraged me to stick with the music as well. So all my life I have been singing and painting.
I would have conversations with European artists. Meaning, people look at my painting and one person would say, "Oh, your painting is just like so-and-so!" Another person would say, "It's just like so-and-so." But at the end, it's a chain of relay like a marathon. There are so many so-and-so's that eventually it becomes mine. My dialogue was completely European, with the '40s, '50s, '60s artists, but on the exterior side I do big painting. It's post-Pollock. It's current. It's a meeting of the time. The Chinese side just comes out.
I did a record with Janet Jackson, and it went to the top of the charts, and we had all of these complications, and she couldn't be in the video and couldn't do anything for the record. I went through something similar with Pitbull. I think it works really well for a lot of other artists, but for me, it just doesn't work that well.
I got really excited about finding new ways of using video, and the immediacy is different, in a way, than painting and photography. The creativity comes with the editing. You can layer and cut and paste. I really love that it's like another form of making my smaller collages but in video form.
My tiny baby blossoming art collection is comprised of works by artists I have either assisted or been mentored by, artists I am friends with, or artists I have traded with. As much as I want to and aspire to acquire works from established artists, I love acquiring works from my contemporaries in order to participate in this moment in time. The advice I would give is know what you like, take your time, and invest in things you feel connected to, as opposed to buying something because it seems cool or "of-the-moment."
Having a background in doing printmaking and letterpress, I think that I became very interested in images that were flat and graphic. And my painting still today is very flat...American craft is like that too - the painting is very flat. And also the painting that you see on the storefronts, handmade signs, tend to be very flat. That's probably my biggest influence.
Photography brought a lot to painting because it forced artists to think about what painting could do that photography couldn't.
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.
If you look at the Gulf War or new military technologies, they are moving towards cyberwars. Most video-technologies and technologies of simulation have been used for war. For example, video was created after the Second World War in order to radio-control planes and aircraft carriers. Thus video came with the war. It took twenty years before it became a means of expression for artists.
I was on the yearbook staff, so I would take out film cameras and Nikons and take photos around school and at sporting events and things like that. We had a darkroom as well. I just loved it. I also saved up for a video camera to video my friends and cut and paste the videos together and I gave them to all of my friends for graduation.
People are always trying to find the next groovy thing, and it hasn't gone back to painting... I'd like it to go back to painting. I'm sick of all this photography and video. There's so much of it, it's almost annoying.
I think I'm really fortunate to be an installation artist who is heavily invested in photography: I don't have the emotional problems with the loss of work that some installation artists have. The photographs wouldn't exist without the installation... but at the same time, I think I'd kill myself if I only did installations. There's something deeply tragic about doing work that you know is temporal.
In general, in painting sometimes people like Picasso or somebody are not very well known in the beginning, sometimes they become well known just before they die, or sometimes after they have died. I think these people start to be artists after they've stopped existing.
Many artists, having assimilated the Conceptualists' explorations to varying degrees, have reused the painterly model and use photography, quite consciously and systematically, to produce works that stand alone and exist as photographic paintings.
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