Julie Mehretu Quotes

I love illustrating for other writers because I am given stories I never would have thought of, and my work as an illustrator is always in support of the story.

Every picture has its own demands, and every picture stimulates something within you to tell it a certain way. I don't know what that is; I don't think too much about that.

I refer to what I do as 'conceptual portraits,' meaning that I come up with an idea or concept that I would like to explore, and then I find people that fit that idea.

So much of what we do as artists is a combination of personal experience and imagination, and how that all creeps into your work is not so linear.

I paint a slice of life, whatever it is that day.

I think I work much the same way I always have. I'm trying to interpret something emotionally visually. I'm reading the brief or article, or listening to the music, and deciding where that sends me, and what would it look like.

My approach to portraiture is conceptual.

[I have a] way of making narrative sculpture, where first you make a text and out of that text you make objects. [...] I start with a story and then I make sculpture from that story, it's just that the stories become more and more elaborate.

I enjoyed learning something and, uh, so I think like with anything in life, in the schoolroom in an artistic endeavor, if you have just a really good teacher, it's inspiring. I certainly use, in my work, I mean, I used to rely heavily on imagery. I was obsessed with this photograph that was in the NY Times of a fish engulfing a smaller fish and this smaller fish had this look in its eyes; it knew what was about to happen and, I don't know how they ever captured such an image, but I've used that for a play I (did). It's called "Saved."

It's a little bit like talking about the life of writing. The life of writing may be about many things, but it always begins with the writer. With the kernel of an idea, or a character, or an idea or a theme, or even an outcome. But for documentary photographers, photographs begin at that intersection of the real world and the imaginative inner world.

Characters I've played, they used to impact my paintings, like 80 percent of the time, and especially when I was doing an action film.

Drawing is still basically the same as it has been since prehistoric times. It brings together man and the world. It lives through magic.

I try to construct a picture in which shapes, spaces, colors, form a set of unique relationships, independent of any subject matter. At the same time I try to capture and translate the excitement and emotion aroused in me by the impact with the original idea.

Music is very influential to my writing, as are theater and film.

People have asked me a lot, 'What comes first? The pictures or the story? The story or the picture?' It's hard to describe because often they seem to come at the same time. I'm seeing images while I'm thinking of the story.

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.

Modeling, for me, isn't about being beautiful but creating something interesting for people to look at and think about.

Sometimes I don't even know what to name a song when I get done with it, and I'll let somebody else tell me what I should call it because it's whatever stuck in their head.

Their films would probably be better if they'd seen a few more films, which runs counter to this idiotic theory that you run the risk of being influenced if you see too much.

I've always believed that photography is a way to shape human perception.

I start listening to something, or I'm seeing somebody a lot or seeing their art. And then I just really want to make a picture of them.

The worst thing is always thinking of titles for records, with some reason behind them, and she just came out with the word, which she thought was a good word, a hard word, and since then we've sort of attached loads of meaning to it.

When I draw a character, very often as I'm doing a face, my face mirrors the expression.

When I say art influences me, which it does, it's not at all in a literal form. You go and see exhibitions or collections or meet an artist. It's all a compilation. Every moment, at all times, all this information. Then all this information disappears, and it shows up later in the process.

When people ask me what it is about Brazil and my work, it's not something that I can say literally. It's unidentifiable. It's like when you do research and things inspire you. If you're smart enough, then obviously you don't take it literally. The inspiration will come out later somehow.