I never really listen to what people say. My thing is that my favorite artists are artists that are theatrical. Obviously when you are doing a recording, things aren't gonna translate as over-the-top.
Even though I'm out there as an artist, I continue droppin' mixtapes, I continue doin' this and continue showin' DJs love personally. That's why I continue doin' a lot of things other artists don't do.
Archimedes was my ideal. I admired the works of artists, but to my mind, they were only shadows and semblances. The inventor, I thought, gives to the world creations which are palpable, which live and work.
All art is concerned with coming into being; for it is concerned neither with things that are, or come into being by necessity, nor with things that do so in accordance with nature.
It does not in the least concern me whether I shall have at the end of my life thirty people who understand or three hundred. I am like an artist who paints a picture because he must, otherwise he is unhappy - not unhappy, but he must obey that creative impulse.
I'm not a writer, but today I think you have to be everything. As an artist you have an obligation to let people know what is on your mind and why you're doing this.
You know, it's no accident that the great painters came from areas like Europe where there is a lot of clouds and rain, which begets color and subtle washes of tone. Most great graphic artists come from areas with prevalent sun, where line and shadow are paramount.
Naturally one would rather be a broad artist with power to evoke beauty from every phase of experience--but when one unmistakably isn't such an artist, there's no sense in bluffing and faking and pretending that one is.
The easy part of being an artist is figuring out the message that everyone else is ready to hear. The hard part is waiting for the proper lull to make the announcement.
While one should always study the method of a great artist, one should never imitate his manner. The manner of an artist is essentially individual, the method of an artist is absolutely universal. The first personality, which no one should copy.
Scholars and artists thrown together are often annoyed at the puzzle of where they differ. Both work from knowledge; but I suspectthey differ most importantly in the way their knowledge is come by. Scholars get theirs with conscientious thoroughness along projected lines of logic; poets theirs cavalierly and as it happens in and out of books. They stick to nothing deliberately, but let what will stick to them like burrs where they walk in the fields.
A good traveler has no fixed plans and is not intent upon arriving. A good artist lets his intuition lead him wherever it wants. A good scientist has freed himself of concepts and keeps his mind open to what is.