Stephen Hillenburg Quotes

My only worry is the painting I'm doing. Nothing else.

I've been painting and drawing fish since I was very young. My mom found old pictures I did when I was around 6 or 7 of all these sharks and scuba diver looking back, a big ship, throwing a harpoon. There was already a message within what I saw.

Everything I do, it's a bit painterly. I like being surrounded by objects, mostly on paper. I like the images. I like the painting. I like good photography. It's something that makes me an emotional connection, and I feel comfortable around it.

I seldom have my stuff up unless I'm testing it. If I'm worrying about a painting, I put it up and see if I detest it quickly or slowly. Otherwise I have things by other artists.

As I had collaborated with visual artists before whether on installations, on performance pieces, in the context of theatre works and as I had taught for a time in art colleges the idea of writing music in response to painting was not alien.

The way I create music is maybe like a painting, to compose in a more visual way. Basically it's the music that I want to hear- that's my inspiration and bottom line. I just try to get ideas from books, movies, paintings.

Every good picture leaves the painter eager to start again, unsatisfied, inspired by the rich mine in which he is working, hoping for more energy, more vitality, more time - condemned to painting for life.

Usually, I am a compulsive person, and I need - sometimes urgently - to paint... Painting is close to poetry, is a kind of poetry expressed visually. It has to be spontaneous, rapid - at least in my case.

If it weren't for how esoteric the art world likes to be, I would love actually to play the music in the shows, painting the music that influences me most.

My painting does not come from the easel.

I can be working on a collection and a film at the same time. It can take a lot out of me, but the processes come from the same source. From a brief I set myself I can make a film, I can make a collection, I can make an installation.

And all of this, all these physical aspects of painting at that time excited me very much. You could do a picture in just black and white. I mean all the things, whether you're soliciting permission or not, do give you permission.

If you're an artist, you want to draw from real life; you want to draw from experiences, emotion, and it's something that a lot of musicians juggle with. I've always found it so fascinating.

I stick the collages on the wall and, if I still like them after a month or two, I make a painting.

But I think that's a particular kind of experience involving a certain immediacy between you and the canvass, you and the particular kind of experience of that particular moment.

It's the idea of a multi-sensory experience stemming from music that opened my interest into painting, to be honest.

I'm not so facile that I can accomplish or find out what I want to know or explore enough of the possibilities and a way of making a painting, say, in just one painting or two paintings.

By painting colors and lines and forms seen in quickened mood I was seeking to make this mood vibrate as a phonograph does. This was the origin of the paintings in The Frieze of Life.

It was only after I began to write fiction that I found a way to connect with painting.

Painting is a very difficult thing. It absorbs the whole man, body and soul, thus have I passed blindly many things which belong to real and political life.

I had tried painting, mostly to give myself a greater appreciation of the craft and to inform how I looked at paintings. That led to collaging some of the work I had done on paper, and I found myself mixing in found pieces as well.

In my experience a painting is not made with colors and paint at all. I don't know what a painting is; who knows what sets off even the desire to paint?

I dream a lot. I do more painting when I'm not painting. It's in the subconscious.

Painting is the most magical of mediums. The transcendence is truly amazing to me every time I go to a museum and I see how somebody figured another way to rub colored dirt on a flat surface and make space where there is no space or make you think of a life experience.

The great thing about a painter is that he or she lives on - I mean, Andrew Wyeth is more in his paintings than he was walking around.