Alison Bechdel Quotes

I think it's natural for an artist to explore as they evolve.

If something gets too easy... I want to do something else. But every album is going to be me, no matter what.

I don't want to compare myself to Picasso, but he had four or five periods in his life. Any good artist grows and changes and matures.

I think, as an artist, it's very important to continue to be challenged and feel challenged all the time.

In life we try to grow and better ourselves. As an artist, I feel like I've grown tremendously.

A bit of a theory, more a corner of the eye noticing than an airtight argument: in the course of long artistic careers, women are more likely than men to change form and style, Proteus-like.

In any art movement, the art has to move into a new phase - a filmmaker has a desire to make a film that is not like a previous film.

My movement from painting to film was a very conscious one.

So I look at a lot of stuff now that I did and some of it looks tame to me, but my interest in terms of what I want to say with it is a little different.

I felt I really wanted to back off from music completely and just work within the visual arts in some way. I started painting quite passionately at that time.

Then I came in twice a week - for my own enjoyment as well as to be a guide. And then we started to apply some of the splinters of the ideas back into the piece.

People say I am stuck in childhood, but it's not that. I remember seeing a Matisse retrospective, and you could see he started out one way, and then he tried something different, and then he seemed to spend his whole life trying to get back to the first thing.

I actually grew up hearing this a lot: 'If you're an actor, you can only be an actor, and you have to just do that.' But in order to be a good actor, you have to draw on life experiences. To only concentrate on acting, you're cutting yourself off.

Not to compare an actor to a painter, but you can go through different phases and still be the same artist, y'know?

That's the most important thing for me is just figuring out how and if I'm growing as an artist.

The reason I did 'PPNH' was because I wanted to do something different, wacky, and mainstream after 'Barfi!'

I'm always concerned about growing as an artist.

I want to make a better record than I made the last time. I want to grow. I want to discover new things about myself creatively.

Perhaps I might be satisfied, momentarily, with a work finished at one sitting, but I would soon get bored looking at it; therefore, I prefer to continue working on it so that later I may recognize it as a work of my mind.

I had a visit from an artist friend who basically said, "Your paintings are wonderful. Now stop." It did resonate with me. It hit on the percolating need for change that was already there. I got a little push. I did a group of the paintings early on that were among the best. It was sort of beginner's luck with these.

The idea is that what an artist lives through should broaden his notion of what it is possible for a human being to live through, and that new understanding should then get into and expand the work.

I think that new artistic challenges help you grow both as a person, as an artist, and then they feed back into your other work, and tend to magnify it.

At first you're doing it for yourself, it's about what sounds good to you. It's about expressing yourself. Then you get comfortable as an artist and you find yourself and people get familiar.

I love develop as an artist, to push my envelope, to grow, to make mistakes, to learn from them and to try and be the very best that I can be while I'm on this earth.

Art is wine and experience is the brandy we distill from it.