John Dyer Quotes

I've heard my work called 'bold' and 'graffiti-like,' but for me it is always instinctual. I start with a shape or a colour and go from there.

Sixteen million colors in your palette are hard for any artist, especially a beginner, to turn down.

My process is really quite organic, and starting a painting is one of the best parts for me. I always start in quite a loose and free way. I often put down one ground colour to begin with and then play off that.

I started doing sculpture in 1959. I had no commissions then. They were painted, similar in style to the paintings... At a certain point, I decided I didn't want an edge between two colors, I wanted color differences in literal space.

But when I worked on a painting I would do it from a drawing but I would put certain things I was fairly sure I wanted in the painting, and then collage on the painting with printed dots or painted paper or something before I really committed it.

I paint on the ground. I paint with sticks, with big paint cans, and whatever else falls in it. Basically, what I'm doing is capturing unbridled emotion and putting it on canvas. It's like capturing lightning in a bottle.

Stick to primary colors.

I'm thinking about color all the time. Sometimes even as far back as the plotting sequence.

I'm inspired by Jackson Pollock; splashing layer upon layer, using different materials, experimenting with new methods to produce something fresh. I'd love to be able to create in this way!

I base everything on my instinctual approach. There's something very satisfying in that creativity, and it's a bit like an infant drawing.

Very little thought goes into making this stuff I make. It is on impulse. I think of colors all day and suddenly if I think of ice blue, I wonder if red or yellow will go with it.

It's instinctive in a certain kind of painting...It's like a nervous system. It's not described, it's happening. The feeling is going on with the task. The line is the feeling, from a soft thing, a dreamy thing, to something hard, something arid, something lonely, something ending, something beginning.

There are some people who may not like precision in their art. They may like it to be grittier and more gestural, more of a direct expression in the way that a painter would put his strokes on canvas.

There's a moment of awe when you watch the colors dry and become lighter.

Everything I record, I just try to sound like me and come up with songs that suit what I do and then just go for it. I never know what the public's going to like, anyway.

I love taking elements and colours from nature and then distorting them somehow.

Whenever I really want to, I can paint. It kinda just goes by my emotions and feelings at the time.

When I am making a film, it's very instinctive, it's not preset.

An artist's initial broad stroke is always most impactful, and obsessively adding layer upon layer of paint to fill in details often diminishes the painting's aura. When an aura is lost, it is impossible to get back.

Before anything else, I started painting bulls and matadors. That was my initiation to paint.

One of the color combos that I really love is the tones of technicolor, which older movies would have, these tones of blue and red in them.

What I've been trying to do with my art, which has been feeling very graphically sharp - to soften it up and make it feel more hand-done.

All I try to do is put as many colors as I can on the canvas every night.

There are no calculations in the records I make. I record as many songs as I can. Songs that I think are my best.

I love every color!