Lawrence Weschler Quotes

Art is something that opens up and enhances your emotions and that's what I like to think I'm doing.

I try to apply colors like words that shape poems, like notes that shape music.

Painting is the most magical of mediums. The transcendence is truly amazing to me every time I go to a museum and I see how somebody figured another way to rub colored dirt on a flat surface and make space where there is no space or make you think of a life experience.

I don't see myself as a photographer. I still see the photographs and collages as a resource for the painting.

For all the years I'd spent talking about pictures, the truth was that I had no idea how to draw or what it felt like to do it. I would mistrust a poetry critic who couldn't produce a rhyming couplet. Could one write about art without knowing how to draw?

Then you learn about composition, you learn about old masters, you form certain ideas about structure. But the inhuman activity of trying to make some kind of jump or leap, where , the painting is always saying, 'What do you want from me? I can only be a painting.' You have to go from part to part, but you shouldn't see yourself go from part to part, that's the whole point.

Everything I do, it's a bit painterly. I like being surrounded by objects, mostly on paper. I like the images. I like the painting. I like good photography. It's something that makes me an emotional connection, and I feel comfortable around it.

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

The way I create music is maybe like a painting, to compose in a more visual way. Basically it's the music that I want to hear- that's my inspiration and bottom line. I just try to get ideas from books, movies, paintings.

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.

If it weren't for how esoteric the art world likes to be, I would love actually to play the music in the shows, painting the music that influences me most.

We're all going about trying to make beauty in the world and trying to make order out of chaos. And that's what art is.

I couldn't go into the haphazard drawing or the paintings, the splashing of paint. I wanted to go back to a completely dry drawing, a dry conception of art.

Painting is the only universal language. All nature is creation's picture book. Painting alone can describe every thing which can be seen, and suggest every emotion which can be felt. Art reaches back into the babyhood of time, and is man's only lasting monument.

It's the idea of a multi-sensory experience stemming from music that opened my interest into painting, to be honest.

Other people notice the same things but they don't think to put it to music.

By painting colors and lines and forms seen in quickened mood I was seeking to make this mood vibrate as a phonograph does. This was the origin of the paintings in The Frieze of Life.

I'd like to write the way Matisse paints.

I view art as an inspirational tool.

I'm a bit of a magpie: whatever I see or hear or read feeds into the songs.

Music is an art form too. Sometimes other forms of art can be inspiring to the musician.

The funny thing is musicians often love to go to see visual art because you've got all these pictures to turn into metaphors.

I'd never painted anything before. I was quite content to take other people's work since I didn't care anyway about the subject matter. I approached subject matter as a scoundrel. I had nothing to say about it whatsoever. I only wanted to make these exciting paintings.

I don't know what really makes a great musical or not. In the end, you write it, and you write it because you want to write it.

If you listen to one of my albums, you can tell I do a lot of different things. In the case of 'Vincent', I thought of his picture 'Starry Night.' It was a beautiful road-map for a song. I used a lot of imagery from that painting.