James Vincent McMorrow Quotes

I think, with music, I'm a lyricist who talks about real life things.

Painting to me is constant searching. I can see what I want, but I can't get there, and yet you have to be open enough that if it goes another way, then let it go that way.

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.

Obviously, the emotions I want to convey through music are streamed through the way I interpret life.

The reason for my painting large canvases is that I want to be intimate and human.

When you think of painting as painting it is rather absurd. The real world is before us - glorious sunlight and activity and fresh air, and high speed motor cars and television, all the animation - a world apart from a little square of canvas that you smear paint on.

I have a studio in the country - in the woods - but my paintings look more real to me than what is outdoors. You walk outside; the rocks are inert; even the clouds are inert. It makes me feel a little better. But I do have a faith that it is possible to make a living thing, not a diagram of what I have been thinking: to posit with paint something living, something that changes each day.

If you're going to be an artist, real life is your inspiration.

I feel the most connected to my art when it comes from my real life and hopefully the audience feels that.

One writes out of one thing only - one's own experience. Everything depends on how relentlessly one forces from this experience the last drop, sweet or bitter, it can possibly give. This is the only real concern of the artist, to recreate out of the disorder of life that order which is art.

I'm interested in art, and I think about the process of making art. It's part of my personality, my experience of the world, so it ends up in the movies. It's where my head is.

You don't make a photograph just with a camera. You bring to the act of photography all the pictures you have seen, the books you have read, the music you have heard, the people you have loved.

Art is a crime scene in a sense, a crucible, of the mind and heart and our dreams.

Thus far, everything I've made has come out of my really feeling it, out of the fire of my life.

Almost every work of art is an analogy. When I make a representation of something, this too is an analogy to what exists; I make an effort to get a grip on the thing by depicting it. I prefer to steer clear of anything aesthetic, so as not to set obstacles in my own way and not to have the problem of people saying: 'Ah, yes, that's how he sees the world, that's his interpretation.'

The reason I'm painting this way is that I want to be a machine, and I feel that whatever I do and do machine-like is what I want to do.

I think my poems immediately come out of the sensuous and emotional experiences I have, but I must say I cannot sympathise with these cries from the heart that are informed by nothing except a needle or a knife, or whatever it is.

The true poem is the poet's mind.

I have a split - of my real home-life side that's real-life, and then the creative side that is not necessarily real-life, but it intersects my real-life so much.

Art is a selective re-creation of reality according to an artists metaphysical value judgments.

I'm a painter, I'm an artist. I take things too far sometimes. I really need some comfort.

I write about what I want to write about, and so the film comes out as a very personal expression even if its subject matter is totally prefabricated.

I can't work without a model. I won't say I turn my back on nature ruthlessly in order to turn a study into a picture, arranging the colors, enlarging and simplifying; but in the matter of form I am too afraid of departing from the possible and the true.

An odd contradiction, if the layman were correct in his unconscious assumption that an artist begins with reality and ends with art: the converse is true - to the degree that this dichotomy has any truth - the artist begins with art, and through it arrives at reality.

My family, my fans and yes, romance is always there in one way or another. Life is full of these emotions and I have always found pleasure in incorporating them into my music.