Kerry James Marshall Quotes

Bad art might be defined as a series of bad choices about what to show and what to leave out.

My approach to portraiture is conceptual.

Every picture one paints involves not painting others.

You realize as a director that when you are cutting a film, you want to have alternatives. You need color and choices. You don't want four takes that are identical.

I try to write in a way where the lyrics have many meanings and you won't really know what's behind it.

As a poet and as an actress, we're taught to be far more elaborate with our words and - I wouldn't say generalize, but definitely stronger with our choices.

In many ways my paintings are about energy — both in how they are created and the image itself.

Usually I draw in relation to my painting, what I am working on at the time. On a lucky day a surprising balance of forms and spaces will appear... making itself, the image taking hold. This in turn moves me toward painting - anxious to get to the same place, with the actuality of paint and light.

Abstract means literally to draw from or separate. In this sense every artist is abstract for he must create his own work from his visual impressions. A realistic or non-objective approach makes no difference. The result is what counts.

I'm not videotaping my life, but in a way I am trying to put certain things about myself on canvas.

If you can talk about it, why paint it?

I'm a really visual artist, and I love writing treatments for music videos, photo shoots, fashion, and all the visual parts that go along with making an album.

There are two ways for a painter: the broad and easy one or the narrow and hard one.

I cannot copy nature in a servile way; I am forced to interpret nature and submit it to the spirit of the picture. From the relationship I have found in all the tones there must result a living harmony of colors, a harmony analogous to that of a musical composition.

For a painter as abstract as myself, the collages offer a way of incorporating bits of the everyday world into pictures.

Photorealism says: to fool your eye. That isn't what I've been interested in doing.

Let's put it this way - I photograph what interests me all the time. I live with the pictures to see what that thing looks like photographed. I'm saying the same thing; I'm not changing it.

People will say things after a screening that it affects them in a certain way, which is why I don't like to explain what certain things are about. I want them to have that. It limits people's ability to understand something if I say it's "about this." That's happened to us a bunch on this.

I try to approach making movies in a way that it's about the making of them and not the result of them, if that makes sense.

Art is limitation; the essence of every picture is the frame. If you draw a giraffe, you must draw him with a long neck. If in your bold creative way you hold yourself free to draw a giraffe with a short neck, you will really find that you are not free to draw a giraffe.

My use of evenly repeated dots and diagonal lines and uninflected color areas suggest that my work is right where it is, right on the canvas, definitely not a window into the world.

I never heard my music played the way I heard it in my head.

When you draw something it lives and when you photograph it it dies

Images are not quite ideas, they are stiller than that, with less implication outside themselves. And they are not myth, they do not have the explanatory power; they are nearer to pure story. Nor are they always metaphors; they do not say this is that, they say this is.

A flower is relatively small... Still in a way-nobody sees a flower-so I said to myself-I'll paint it big.