Mark Bradford Quotes

Architecture struck me between the eye and the eyeball.

And exciting buildings are fine periodically.

Buildings designed with careful attention to aesthetics arouse and enlighten their occupants and that promotes their good health.

There are two types of people, you see. One type keep their heads straight, and look around as they walk. The others look up - at the tops of houses, at the eaves and the lintels and the roofs, which can tell you when they were built - and I've always done that.

I have the same sense of discovery and exhilaration from objects of design and everyday use - I am inspired by the buildings in my city, by park greenery and dazzling store windows, by the jaunty strollers and umbrellas and billboards I walk past. Just strolling our streets, we encounter creativity every single day.

Most inspiration still comes from bicycling around San Francisco. This city never fails to inspire me. It is one of the most vibrant cities - especially visually - with a constant influx of young energy arriving daily. I love it.

I grew up in the suburbs, so I remember arriving at Waterloo and seeing Big Ben and the coloured lights on top of the Southbank Centre and thinking, 'Wow!'

My computer background is a black and white picture I took of the Niteroi Contemporary Art Museum in Brazil.

I like to keep my feet on the sidewalk.

I love walking along Leith's waterfront and wandering around some of New Town's beautiful streets and squares, with their gorgeous Georgian architecture.

I've always been drawn to city skylines.

Often the art in New York is related to the buildings, to grandiose things.

In New York, the street adventures are incredible. There are a thousand stories in a single block. You see the stories in the people's faces. You hear the songs immediately. Here in Los Angeles, there are less characters because they're all inside automobiles.

I can't get enough of London! I love all the picnic benches, the old-school phone booths and parks in the middle of the city.

I've always liked street lights, and I've always photographed them. I probably have a collection of two to three thousand photographs of them, just around the city, mainly at night.

Architecture is basically a container of something. I hope they will enjoy not so much the teacup, but the tea.

Buildings are forms of performances.

The eye must be easy, before it can be pleased.

To romp along the connected rooftops and fire escapes of Chicago's second city of garages was my young life's passion.

If I have open time, and I'm in Manhattan, I'll just walk to wherever I'm going, even if I could get there faster on the subway. I just love walking the streets of New York.

My work reflects a relationship to the built world that shifts between control and randomness, strangeness and beauty, comfort and fear.

Liquid architecture. It's like jazz - you improvise, you work together, you play off each other, you make something, they make something. And I think it's a way of - for me, it's a way of trying to understand the city, and what might happen in the city.

Most of the time, people look at a piece of art online when it is just a few blocks from their house. Changing the way you walk home everyday fills life with surprises.

I have a strange habit of walking down streets and staring up, rather than looking at shopfronts and stuff like that.

It's very weird waking around a corner and being nose to nose with myself on the side of a bus. And Times Square - that's the craziest one.