Hilton Als Quotes

Painting will have to deal more fully and less obliquely with life and nature's phenomena before it can again become great.

In the visual arts, particularly painting, I distrust all those abstractions, those artificial constructions. I have a very simple way of judging them: if I can do them, they are not art.

Things like anatomy and drawing and design and color had pretty much been drop-kicked out of the curriculum in the '70s, when I was studying art, in favor of abstraction and minimalism.

Music - you need the give and take from the audience, the feeling of attention. It's not about me: it's about the music itself.

There are only two styles of portrait painting; the serious and the smirk.

I only understand realism.

I generally only paint people I know, I'm not a flatterer really.

I came down successfully through Picasso and Braque, down through Pollock, I guess, but I began to stop at Franz Kline and the Abstractionists. I like their design, brilliant design, marvelous color layers. But I don't find any human content there. I'm from an old school, and painting has to have human content for me.

I had rather see the portrait of a dog that I know, than all the allegorical paintings they can show me in the world.

If Art relates itself to an Object, it becomes descriptive, divisionist, literary.

Painting is the representation of visible forms. The essence of realism is its negation of the ideal.

I do portraits. I usually do live models in a class environment, but I've been painting at home more. I really love the human form, and I love faces. I've tried to do landscapes a few times.

I will always find even the worst paintings that attempt some kind of representation better than the best invented paintings.

That's what I paint, I paint people. They're portraits, but you won't always be pleased with the way you look in my paintings. Which is fine, I guess. Unless you're buying it, and it's of your kid!

The best teacher is an audience. The ideal performance is when that group of strangers sitting in the dark gets energy from the group in the light and sends energy back to us. When it really works, a perfect circle is formed.

I don't really look like people in films; I look like people in paintings.

I have done only two portraits: one of the artist Francesco Clemente and another of Andy Warhol.

When I was painting portraits and - shall we say? - rather allegorical heads, which is the figurative work which immediately preceded the direction I have since gone, these images were always of a very fixed, rigid quality, and, of course, my work still has this aspect.

That's what music-making is: a dialogue.

If I had gone to art college and everybody was being a conceptual artist, I probably would have wanted to be a portrait or landscape painter.

Never paint your wife or your mother.

Like anything to do with trust, in any relationship it emerges and just the chemistry, vibe between two people an actor and a director. You just know whether this is someone I like to be with whose interaction with me I believe in.

I think that's the most important thing: that we create dialogue.

I love movies, don't get me wrong. But I don't go to the cinema. I see movies at the end of the year as a glut from the Academy. I binge-watch all the nominated films. Painting fills that void now. It's oils. It's acrylics. It's figurative, portraits and landscape.

I'm not one of those artists having people there lying around on their paintings, you know, like Hockney or whoever.