Billy Al Bengston Quotes

I'm lyrically driven, I'm not musically driven.

The dog is the perfect portrait subject. He doesn't pose. He isn't aware of the camera.

If cattle and horses, or lions, had hands, or were able to draw with their feet and produce the works which men do, horses would draw the forms of gods like horses, and cattle like cattle, and they would make the gods' bodies the same shape as their own.

I've had encounters with animals that have been really mystical. I've always been really into animals. But the way they appear in the paintings, they come from my mind's eye more than: 'I'm gonna draw a dog now.' It isn't thought out: 'Now I'm gonna draw a bird.' They just appear.

I don't really think about a visual aspect to the work at all; I just think about making the piece. And everything that occurs visually comes out of the subject matter you are dealing with so that I find it difficult to treat the visual element as a separate entity.

But if cattle and horses or lions had hands, or were able to draw with their hands and do the work that men can do, horses would draw the forms of the gods like horses, and cattle like cattle, and they would make their bodies such as they each had themselves.

I mostly paint animals I'm familiar with, but I did a series of paintings of ravens, so I read everything about them.

All the animals I've painted always have a relationship with man. I have been told that part of the knowledge of the human anatomy comes from animals.

I don't deal in technique. I deal in emotions.

I'm not an abstractionist... I'm not interested in relationships of colour or form or anything else.

If cattle and horses, or lions, had hands...

The romantic artist expects people to ask, 'What has he got to say?' The classical artist expects them to ask, 'How does he say it?

[A novel by Henry James] is like a church lit but without a congregation to distract you, with every light and line focused on the high altar. And on the altar, very reverently place, intensely there, is a dead kitten, an egg-shell, a bit of string.

My whole trick is to keep the tune well out in front. If I play Tchaikovsky, I play his melodies and skip his spiritual struggle.

I don't really make records chronologically.

I judge a woman and a horse by the same criteria: legs, head and rear end.

My process differs... my process for a Richard Linklater film is very different than a process for Training Day.

When I'm photographing, I don't have that kind of nonsense running around in my head. I'm photographing. It's irrelevant in the end, so it doesn't mean a thing. It's not going to make me do better work or worse work as I can see it now.

I'd like ten more babies and ten more chihuahuas and a few Academy Awards. Meanwhile, I enjoy being a sex symbol and making people happy.

... the main concern of the fiction writer is with mystery as it is incarnated in human life.

There are so many good ones to paint and if you paint as well as you really can and keep out of all other things and do that, it is the true thing.

All I'm doing is photographing. When I was working on The Animals, I was working on a lot of other things too. I kept going to the zoo because things were going on in certain pictures. It wasn't a project.

There's an infinite amount of possibilities and detours and things that can distract you from actually just performing the song and having whatever emotion that's invested into the song come through in the recording.

I would define myself as being naive and perverse at the same time. And I think that if that is consistent it will make the tone consistent.