Elizabeth Peyton Quotes

I like drawing people in the airport or on the bus or in venues. I like catching people in the moment. It's a similar inspiration for me in terms of songwriting.

Whenever I do someone's portrait, I'm trying to locate the photo in the lens while reaching into that person psychologically. There's the magic! I don't always achieve it. It's a hit or a miss!

There was a village watercolour society and they'd come and paint in my field. I watched them from the window, the way they would struggle this way and that to find the perfect moment. God has made every angle on that beautiful, and I felt that tremendously.

You'd have to be completely crazy not to be influenced by and take from other artists. It's completely impossible not to.

I do not go in search of poetry. I wait for poetry to visit me.

Music is the doorway that has led me to drawing, photography, and writing.

People have told me that other artists have been influenced by my music, and it's flattering. It's a wonderful thing.

When I paint a picture of a house, that goes back to my roots.

I don't think I really invented anybody. I have drawn on real life.

I almost literally wake up in the morning starting to think of my next idea. It's almost always driven by what's in the news. The hard part, really, is getting from knowing what I want to say to figuring out how to say it in an image. I'm still not entirely sure how to explain how that happens... Suddenly, something just works.

Composers shouldn't think too much - it interferes with their plagiarism.

My influences change all the time; they have to remain current, because they're the things that capture your imagination and make you want to go into the studio.

I don't get my inspiration from a specific source. It's more like if you listen to a good tune, it gives me inspiration to write a better tune.

I guess that in this process of trying to incorporate or to be faithful to the films I admire so much, that's how I start to find my own voice. The admiration I have for filmmakers, this gratitude, perhaps that's my only way to become specific.

Their films would probably be better if they'd seen a few more films, which runs counter to this idiotic theory that you run the risk of being influenced if you see too much.

I'm inspired by looking at art, by looking at precedent. Looking is what you have to do if you want to make things, so you develop a critical eye.

So much of what we do as artists is a combination of personal experience and imagination, and how that all creeps into your work is not so linear.

I don't really care who gets their inspiration from where, it's the end results that count.

I guess my husband is a muse as well.

I am always looking for material - whether for my notebooks or for Twitter or Instagram - which means I'm looking for meaning.

My work always comes from the same source - from movement. It doesn't necessarily come from an outside idea, though the source can be something small or large that I've seen, often birds or other animals. The seeing can then provoke the imagining.

I probably get most of my inspiration through music.

It's easy for a singer to sometimes pick up on another singer's sound, but that's just copying.

If something sticks with me for a long time, it goes into a painting.

It's weird: I don't really know where I pull my inspiration from. I think it's N.E.R.D.