James Vincent McMorrow Quotes

I completely work on the basis of my intuition. I don't think I premeditate a success formula. There is no formula to make a successful film.

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.

I've always been somebody who, when I started a picture, never knew what the next picture would be.

What a fine line there is between artistry and insanity. There's no formula for it, and I think a lot of people when they're around you - even those closest to you - when you're in that whirl of creativity and you're grabbing those things out of the air, there's no rational process.

I just throw it out and see what happens. If it sounds and feels right, then I continue.

I never know what I'm going to put on the canvas. The canvas paints itself. I'm just the middleman.

I write and draw from the gut. I often don't know what my stories are about until they're done.

The artist discards all theories, both his own and those of others. He forgets everything when he is in front of his canvas.

Creativity makes a leap, then looks to see where it is.

We don't always know what we're doing. We often just get excited, put something down, and say, 'Oh, neat'.

Sometimes, I knew generally what I was going to do, but I've never written anything down. Call it a sixth sense: the lines just come.

Maybe some people, when they sit down to write their great novel or make their great record or paint their great painting, they have it all planned out in their head. But for me, it's never worked that way.

I wanted to create a body of work that I was proud of. It's come from honesty and integrity, without forcing anything from myself, the ideas had to come instinctively and organically. Whether that translates to people in that way, it's kind of out of my hands now.

When I'm working on something, even when I don't know exactly where it's going, I have a sense of what I'd like to make. So maybe doing things right is following that sense even when I stop trusting myself. The rightness is in the process, even if it doesn't match up with my plans.

I can't describe how I make a film. It's organic.

There are some projects where you have to just start doing it, and, after a while, the show starts telling you what it wants to be. You put your spirit in and, after a while, something bigger takes over, and it turns out to be much more fun and creative than what it was at the beginning.

Cover the canvas at the first go, and then work on till you see nothing more to add ... Don't proceed according to rules and principles, but paint what you observe and feel. Paint generously and unhesitatingly, for it is best not to lose the first impression.

I think it's really important to not talk about how you're going to release something until you've finished it. People are like, "What are we going to make? What are we going to do with it?" and it's just like, "I don't know, we're just making music. Then we'll talk." You can't always write something you're happy with; you can't force it.

The most important thing is to keep creating and following my inklings as they come into being and acting on them.

When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn't really do it, they just saw something.

I always work better when I do not reason, when no question of right or wrong enter in,-when my pulse quickens to the form before me without hesitation nor calculation.

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.

My instinct about painting says, 'if you don't think about it, it's right.' As soon as you have to decide and choose, it's wrong. And the more you decide about, the more wrong it gets.

If I knew what the picture was going to be like I wouldn’t make it. It was almost like it was made already – the challenge is more about trying to make what you can’t think of.

My pictures are never pre-visualized or planned. I feel strongly that pictures must come from contact with things at the time and place of taking. At such times, I rely on intuitive, perceptual responses to guide me, using reason only after the final print is made to accept or reject the results of my work.