Jesse L. Martin Quotes

I have been drawing all my life.

I brought samples in, because I didn't have any comic book samples, and I brought all these illustrations that I had influenced by Norman Rockwell and a couple of the other big boys. That's all I had, that's all I brought.

I'm not an Abstraction Expressionist, but I think dedication to paintings comes from an early interest in that work.

All I care about these days is painting — photography has never been more than a way into painting, a sort of instant drawing.

Like a lot of young people who wanted to be artists, comics were a gateway for me.

I'm a painter, that's where I started out, at four years old, that was my first love as far as expression. So, I'm not a painter in the sense of, "Please come see my paintings" but, I do understand the value of not looking over the artist's shoulder while the work is in progress.

I wanted to be a painter, somewhere between Abstract Expressionism and Pop.

My father is a well known artist, Ted Dyer, who has been painting for many years. Our work is very different, but growing up surrounded by paintings, paints, easels and art books does have an effect.

I liked drawing and painting, because the only failure would be to listen to the doubters who wanted me to stop drawing and painting because 'you aren't going to make a living doing that.' I liked looking in art books at the work of painters.

For whatever crispness and animation my writing has I give some credit to the cartoonist manque.

I grew up with artists.

I began drawing as a very young child and had a grandfather who experimented with photography, so those things constituted my first exposure to art.

I was always artistic - right from childhood - but my love of painting came a bit later. It followed my love of music.

All the pictures I could never do, I'll do it in comics. All the comics I do are the pictures I could never do.

We grew out of the superhero comics, but we still liked comics, so we started putting our own experiences in the stories we were doing for our own amusement.

I knew I wanted to be an artist at age 5 or 6. I always drew. At 8, I was permitted to study.

This new art made a deep impression on me, and I began to study it ardently.

My first influences were superhero artists.

Comics is still my first love. But I always did other kinds of writing, too, so I think of myself as a writer first.

My best efforts were some modern things that looked like very lousy Matisses. Thank God I had the sense to realize they were lousy, and leave Paris.

And all of this, all these physical aspects of painting at that time excited me very much. You could do a picture in just black and white. I mean all the things, whether you're soliciting permission or not, do give you permission.

For me, who loves to draw and who loves to write and cannot choose between one or the other, the comic is the best form.

I paint landscapes, figuratives. I painted all my life. In fact, I started as a commercial artist.

When you are older, you realise that everything else is just nothing compared to painting and drawing.

Whatever an artist's personal feelings are, as soon as an artist fills a certain area on the canvas or circumscribes it, he becomes historical. He acts from or upon other artists.