Jeffrey Brown Quotes

I've always felt that if one was going to take seriously this vocation as an artist, you have to get beyond that decorative facade.

I want to solidify as an artist and show that as I grow as a person and make mistakes and learn from them, I'm going to grow artistically.

One of the greatest things about being an artist is, as you get older, if you keep working hard in relationship to what you want the world to be and how you want it to become, there is a history of interesting growth that resonates with different moments in your life.

One can rightly speak of an evolution in plastic art. It is of the greatest importance to note this fact, for it reveals the true way of art - the only path along which we can advance.

Music is art, and once you become an artist, you need to learn how to accept criticism.

I've definitely grown and evolved as a person, as an artist, you know. Just in terms of my style, my taste, my influences, everything... That's a part of being an artist I think.

I wanted to get out of this country and experience different ways of seeing the world. So I went to Europe, but I went as an artist. I was increasing my skill set and exploring storytelling through painting.

Progress in art does not consist in reducing limitations, but in knowing them better.

I think that my responsibility to my art is to try to get it right or to push the boundaries of what I'm able to do in any way.

It is much to my advantage that several of my pictures should be seen together, as it displays to advantage their varieties of conception and also of execution, and what they gain by the mellowing hand of time which should never be forced or anticipated. Thus my pictures when first coming forth have a comparative harshness which at the time acts to my disadvantage.

An artist has got to be constantly in a state of becoming.

Imagination without knowledge leads no farther than the back yard of primitive art, the child's scrawl on the fence, and the crank's message in the market place. Art is never simple.

In the world of art, as in the whole of creation, freedom and progress are the main objectives.

No matter how consummate a work of art may seem, it is only an approximation of the original conception. It is the artist's consciousness of this discrepancy between his conception and the realization that assures his progress.

The dimensions of a work of art are seldom realized by the author until the work is accomplished. It is like a flowering dream. Ideas grow, budding silently, and there are a thousand illuminations coming day by day as the work progresses. A seed grows in writing as in nature. The seed of the idea is developed by both labor and the unconscious, and the struggle that goes on between them.

You can't let other people dictate what your art is supposed to be. That's the opposite of art. You should constantly be challenging yourself to grow and change and create and evolve. I'm into that spirit of experimental and underground music. The constant, the groping, seeking, moving forward, regardless of where it might take you at that moment. It's all part of a larger arc.

I'd be very suspicious of anybody that seems to have to move to the next level of expression. I distrust that: now I'm writing a book, now I'm being an actor. It should be a natural thing. I think it's a natural thing for you to act. But I think that people that feel that, because they've written one maybe quite beautiful love song that equips them to play Romeo, is probably misguided.

If you are a good writer you use your life experience to do something different than someone who is 20-years-old can do. That is where you get your power. That is our power as a group. I am not trying to make the same music I made 10 years ago.

My hope is to continue to make new music and go with the flow. I think I'll always be creative. I want to keep making good music, put myself into positions where I need to rise to the occasion of playing in front of an audience, and continually get better at what I'm doing.

I achieved perfection, my type of perfection - visual storytelling. Storytelling was my style.

But I want to deepen as an artist, and working with Shakespeare definitely points in that direction.

An artist conscientiously moves in a direction which for some good reason he takes, putting one work in front of the other with the hope he'll arrive before death overtakes him.

Art is not difficult because it wishes to be difficult, rather because it wishes to be art. However much the writer might long to be straightforward, these virtues are no longer available to him. He discovers that in being simple, honest, straightforward, nothing much happens.

Jordie Bellaire knows how to tell a story with color.

You have to remain strong. That's the kind of filmmaker I want to encourage. Orson Welles was the one who said, you know, you can learn anything you need to know about filmmaking- that's camera, sound, celluloid, video at this point- in four hours. It has nothing to do with anything. It has nothing to do with it... It has to do with what you want to say. If you feel you have something to say, you'll find that way to get it said, on film, and not let anyone or anything chip away at that or tarnish it, because it's something special and precious.