Marcel Dzama Quotes

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

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

Unlike a lot of choreographers, I don't always start with the music. I often start with a visual artist, and then find music that fits the world of that visual artist.

If it weren't for how esoteric the art world likes to be, I would love actually to play the music in the shows, painting the music that influences me most.

My painting does not come from the easel.

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.

My work, in a certain way, got started in 1996 when I did an exhibition of thirteen paintings that were solely based on fashion imagery.

I stick the collages on the wall and, if I still like them after a month or two, I make a painting.

I couldn't go into the haphazard drawing or the paintings, the splashing of paint. I wanted to go back to a completely dry drawing, a dry conception of art.

But I think that's a particular kind of experience involving a certain immediacy between you and the canvass, you and the particular kind of experience of that particular moment.

It's the idea of a multi-sensory experience stemming from music that opened my interest into painting, to be honest.

I'm not so facile that I can accomplish or find out what I want to know or explore enough of the possibilities and a way of making a painting, say, in just one painting or two paintings.

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.

My only worry is the painting I'm doing. Nothing else.

I make paintings, try to get others to look at them and hopefully buy them.

I'd like to write the way Matisse paints.

Since the tubes of paint used by the artist are manufactured and ready-made products, we must conclude that all the paintings in the world are 'ready-mades aided' and also works of assemblage.

I think of film when I paint. Even the luminosity that I always keep working for is really about film. But my idea is not to paint paintings that will decorate somebody's house.

I don't draw on my inner life in my work.

Works of art inspire me to compose.

I don't see myself as a photographer. I still see the photographs and collages as a resource for the painting.

Being an artist, you soak up imagery, and you put it back out in whatever form you do your own imagery.

I like drawing from all kinds of territories in art.

When I'm making a collage, there are a lot of things about it that are violent.

When you think of painting as painting it is rather absurd. The real world is before us - glorious sunlight and activity and fresh air, and high speed motor cars and television, all the animation - a world apart from a little square of canvas that you smear paint on.