every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter. The sitter is merely the accident, the occasion. It is not he who is revealed by the painter; it is rather the painter who, on the coloured canvas, reveals himself.
The artist never really has any control over the impact of his work. If he starts thinking about the impact of his work, then he becomes a lesser artist.
In this world, artists are joyous. Unpredictability is the life of their paintings, their music, their novels. They delight in events not forecasted, happenings without explanation, retrospective.
The only artists I have ever known who are personally delightful are bad artists. Good artists exist simply in what they make, and consequently are perfectly uninteresting in what they are.
What to paint was a problem for the war artist... the old heroics, the death and glory stuff, were gone forever... the impressionistic technique I had developed was now ineffective, for visual impressions were not enough.
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.
The habits of every animal are, at least in the eyes of man, constantly similar in all ages. But the habits, the clothes, the words and the dwelling of a prince, a banker, an artist, a bourgeois, a priest and a pauper, are wholly dissimilar and change at the will of civilizations.
If you see something is going wrong within politics and the world today, then some Hip Hop artist is gonna come along and get straight with it. If they think that there's a lot of racism going on then there's another Hip Hop artist who's gonna come out and speak their mind.
We grow hostile to many an artist or writer, not because we finally come to see he has deceived us, but because he thought no subtler means were required to ensnare us.
Images also help me find and realise ideas. I look at hundreds of very different, contrasting images and I pinch details from them, rather like people who eat from other people`s plates.