Richard Phillips Quotes

I am an artisan. I only became an artist when people watch what I do. That is when it becomes art.

Art doesn't transform. It just plain forms.

Whatever you do in life, there's content and form; only those two put together create special meaning of a great work of art or great interpretation of music or a great story that you tell.

Art is an invention of aesthetics, which in turn is an invention of philosophers... What we call art is a game.

The other great development has been in photography, but that too was influenced by Conceptual art.

You can't just take an image and randomly distort it and call it art - although many people in La Jolla where I come from do precisely that.

Defining art is huge; I feel like it's such a subjective thing. It's more like what's not art. You know what I mean? I think there can be an art in the way people live their lives, and art can be a gift someone gives to somebody.

David is purely a conceptual artist. He didn't play any instruments or paint or anything. We were painters.

What is it that an artist does when he is left alone in his studio? My conclusion was that if I was an artist and I was in the studio, then everything I was doing in the studio should be art . . . . From that point on, art became more of an activity and less of a product.

It became like a symbolic thing, to be “an artist.” After Duchamp, I realized that being an artist is more about a lifestyle and attitude than producing some product.

I'm not knocking conceptual art; it's another department, but it doesn't move me like painting.

It is art that makes life, makes interest, makes importance and I know of no substitute whatever for the force and beauty of its process.

In the eighteenth century, it was ladies and gentlemen and swings in a garden; today, it may be Campbell's soup cans or highway signs. There is no real difference. The artist still takes his everyday world and tries to make something out of it.

I seldom have my stuff up unless I'm testing it. If I'm worrying about a painting, I put it up and see if I detest it quickly or slowly. Otherwise I have things by other artists.

Painting is the passage from the chaos of the emotions to the order of the possible.

I realize that every picture isn't a work of art.

While I don't script and I don't use other performers, I think my taste for underlying precision gives me something in common with Allan and George Brecht.

What is bad painting? Picabia made some deliberately bad paintings, but they were by him, so great in a way.

Preliminary drawings or sketches in oil or pastel often have an immediacy and emotional appeal far greater than the final canvas.

I show elements of the set in my pictures because it's not real. When I see movies, I often love the 'making of' more than the movie itself. It's not so final. When you have a woman just standing there, it doesn't mean much.

Fine artists reflect, and then they act. Fashion photographers - we act, and then we reflect.

Film should be looked at straight on; it is not the art of scholars but of illiterates.

Art has been good for my soul. And it's been good for my brain. I think I'm a better painter now than I was a musician growing up. You struggle to see things and translate an image through your hands to a canvas.

The use of the term art medium is, to say the least, misleading, for it is the artist that creates a work of art not the medium. It is the artist in photography that gives form to content by a distillation of ideas, thought, experience, insight and understanding.

I'm a contemporary artist and I show in art galleries and museums. I show a number of photographs and films, but I also make television programs, books and some appetizing, all with the same concept.