Jackson Pollock Quotes

When I'm painting, I'm not aware of what I'm doing. It's only after a get acquainted period that I see what I've been about. I've no fears about making changes for the painting has a life of its own.

Whenever I'm making songs, I am pretty much, quote unquote, freestyling them into existence.

For me, the sketchbooks are more like a secret and wholly spontaneous jeu d'esprit and some of them I like as much as anything I have ever done. They are invariably without premeditation. I mean not only that I have no plan when I make them, I also have no plan to make them.

Learn to draw. Try to make your hand so unconsciously adept that it will put down what you feel without your having to think of your hands. Then you can think of the thing before you.

I feel that Jazz improvisation is the ultimate. You have to create on the spot, the essence of this music.

All you can do as an artist is do what you think is an extension of you. You put down on paper ... who you are. That's what being an artist is all about. And when it gets done, you don't look back at it and say, Oh, I could have done that better.

I wish I could be more serious about painting. I think there may be something going on there and I should pursue it. I'm very old-fashioned - even with the music. I realize, while I have so much respect for the kookiness of people who go for it, who paint with their eyes closed, I am superclassical.

Think of drawing as a way of talking about the things that interest you. Think of those wonderful documents, drawings made on scraps of paper by the lesser Dutch masters while they were wandering around market places and sitting in saloons.

For me, making a movie is kind of like vomiting. Not that film is like vomit, but more like this mass of ideas and thoughts that you have and just have to put them out there. It's not even about making perfect sense - it's more about making perfect nonsense. I don't do too much soul-searching or self-analysis. I just enjoy making things.

My thing is about following the accidental, more than trying to paint an accurate bowl of apples. I enjoy most following the paint. It leads me somewhere else. I think I enjoy just letting the magic unfold and letting the spirit of the paint tell me where we're going.

It [lighting the set up] is quite a process. It's like drawing. It's like being an artist. You pencil it in first, and then you ink it. When you're filming, it's like you're penciling it all in. You know where everything is going to go. But, that application of the final ink takes some time.

Sometimes I find myself at three o'clock in the morning painting something and throwing things around and seeing what works. I'd like to properly study fine art. I think it would be quite an interesting endeavor.

All my work begins with drawings. I don’t labor over my drawings. I want to get freedom in the line. I like to be able to get swift curves in the plant drawings that are usually drawn in five to ten minutes.

There are those who make music and movies in a linear way: They plan them, they have a script. Of course, you have to have a script sometimes, but that alone isn't enough.

I wonder if I would have been capable of producing anything if I worked in a more conventional way with a prewritten script, because I'm of the procrastinator class.

Fortunately, I have an amazing partner that allows us to do these different things, who will be directing an episode himself soon, I'm sure. But, it's amazing. I love directing and I think that it allowed me to get closer to the actors and actually work with them on a level that I haven't before, and really get down there with them. I would jump at the chance to do it, anytime I could.

The cliché of that sort of wasted, renegade, drugged-out musician of the '70s is kind of dead and gone now. And I suppose that a lot of people still keep relying on that, or some kind of image to perpetuate something that they think they're supposed to sound like. But that kind of takes you away from real inspiration and, you know, real artistic discovery of the individual.

I personally think if you're given four months instead of four weeks on a play, with the people who want to work that way, the play will invariably be different and stronger, and much more fulfilling and richer on all counts. There's no doubt in my mind about it.

I think that artists don't make art - the art makes itself through us. I'm not the doer. I'm just along for the ride. Acting really reminds me of that because I don't write the words; I don't make the decisions. That's the director. Narcissism is a tragic condition. It must be so miserable to live trapped in a reflection that only includes the smallest version of our identities. Our true identities should have no bounds and no limits.

An entertainer is someone who pleases others, and an artist tries to please himself. An artist is on a journey: they don't know where they're going, what is going to happen, but they know they are not there yet, and there is some continuity and growth. I think of myself as an entertainer: I'm a performing entertainer, I'm a stand-up comic. But there's an artist at work here, too. One who interprets his world through his own filter.

I just do as many songs as I can and then I put it together when I get sort of in the middle, maybe 30 songs, that's when I start really thinking about the name of the cd and what direction all the songs are going, that kind of stuff. But I don't ever want to corner myself, I just want to be able to express whatever I can express in songs and just pick after that.

If you just write the kinds of stories you think others will want to read, you'll be competing with cartoonists who are far more enthusiastic for that kind of comic than you are, and they'll kick your ass every time.

Photography is unlike any other art form. In the other arts there is always a continuous interplay between the artist and his art. He has the painting or sculpture before him. What we have tried to do is to provide a medium for "artistic expression" to anyone with only a reasonable amount of time. By giving him a camera system with which he need only control his selection of focus, composition and lighting, we free him to select the moment and to criticize immediately what he has done. We enable him to see what else he wants to do on the basis of what he has just learned.

Most art students are generous till it comes to squeezing their colour on the palette... Many pictures haven't become works of art simply because the artist tried to save a nickel's worth of colour.

I think the tools were always available, for decades and decades, to make your own film and be creative. I don't think people had to wait for YouTube to do this type of small project. YouTube, I think it's great. I have this idiotic satisfaction. And I think there's a bit of that in YouTube. You share, true, but it's centralized, and it's already sort of controlled. I'm more for something that's not a centralized medium. Like doing your own film and screening it yourself. You cannot control people doing that.