Alex Winston Quotes

I quietly work with my computer on the tour bus, and then I wait to make my more natural rhythms when I get home.

What art offers is space - a certain breathing room for the spirit.

I never saw myself so much as an actor. I wanted to be a cartoonist like Charles M. Schulz and create my own world and be able to have a studio at home and not commute and be able to be with my family.

I don't mind sitting at home playing the guitar for a year as long as I'm making good films.

I built a studio in my house so I can be with my kids. I go out to my approval meetings [for my collection] while they nap, but at least I can sing [at home] while they sleep at night.

It is a commonplace among artists and children at play that they're not aware of time or solitude while they're chasing their vision. The hours fly. The sculptress and the tree-climbing tyke both look up blinking when Mom calls, 'Suppertime!'

Whatever art offered the men and women of previous eras, what it offers our own, it seems to me, is space - a certain breathing room for the spirit. The town I grew up in had many vacant lots; when I go back now, the vacant lots are gone. They were a luxury, just as tigers and rhinoceri, in the crowded world that is making, are luxuries. Museums and bookstores should feel, I think, like vacant lots - places where the demands on us are our own demands, where the spirit can find exercise in unsupervised play.

The idea of space is given to the artist to change if he can. The subject matter in the abstract is space.

Venues are all the same, all feel the same, these generic blank spaces. I like artists like Lightning Bolt-bands that go in and kind of change things every time, play on the floor, set up in the middle of the room. They go in and they reinvent the space every time, which I feel is like the kind of thing that should just be happening.

I taught myself how to draw, and I soon found out it was what I really wanted to do. I didn't think I was going to create any great masterpieces like Rembrandt or Gauguin. I thought comics was a common form of art, and strictly American in my estimation, because America was the home of the common man - and show me the common man that can't do a comic. So comics is an American form of art that anyone can do with a pencil and paper.

The best moments involve a loss of control. It's a kind of rapture, and it can happen with words and phrases fairly often - completely surprising combinations that make a higher kind of sense, that come to you out of nowhere. But rarely for extended periods, for paragraphs and pages - I think poets must have more access to this state than novelists do.

And every true artist is the salvation of every other. But only artists produce for each other the world that is fit to live in.

There's a perception that if an artist produces another artist, they're going to imprint on them. But I'm the opposite. I want to hear that artist; I don't want to hear me - that's the last thing I want to hear. There are a lot of technical studio things I've learned or figured out, and I feel like I could use those things to help other people with what they're doing.

I would never go to a studio. I need my space, you know what I mean? I need to be able to chain smoke and pace about, cry and like... spit. Just make noise, make a huge mess. I also feel like if I was concerned for the cost of the studio - like, 'this is costing 40 dollars an hour' - I wouldn't be able to work.

There is something else to be said about this immediate, spontaneous way of working, and that is this: in such moments, one is playing at the game of creation.

I'm really an artist of feeling. I like creating things when it feels right.

I care deeply about anyone who listens to my music. That's a sacred connection between the artist and the person who appreciates what you do - it's beyond words how meaningful that is. But I'm not going to stifle myself from trying new things because I feel like people that are already into my stuff might not like it.

A real artist may create his picture in a lonely desert... gods look over his shoulder; he creates in their company. What does he care whether or not anybody admires his picture?

Picasso had a saying - 'good artists copy, great artists steal' - and we have always been shameless about stealing great ideas.

I would advise young artists to paint as they can, as long as they can, without being afraid of painting badly.

I always wanted to be an artist. I think I was just waiting on somebody to approve me and be like, "Oh, okay, you should be an artist," you know 'cause it wasn't until I stopped looking for approval that I could actually do it.

Poetry is the universal art of the spirit which has become free in itself and which is not tied down for its realization to external sensuous material; instead, it launches out exclusively in the inner space and the inner time of ideas and feelings.

In America, we know to ignore artists if they're serious in any way.

A critic has no right to the narrowness which is the frequent prerogative of the creative artist.

The artist must ever play and experiment with new means of arranging experience, even though the majority of his audience may prefer to remain fixed in their old perceptual attitudes.