Martin Puryear Quotes

We never sit down before we start making a record and talk about this new sonic palette that we are going to try to explore. We always let the record kind of reveal itself to us over time.

Art is not a thing; it is a way.

My intentions have been, and are always, to just really get behind what my ideas are musically and to just ride this thing out, cause it feels good, and I think for the most part it's good music. Even when it's not, I'd like to still search for something that could be even like a little bit mind-blowing or shocking to me.

Life is painting a picture, not doing a sum.

We need less perfect but more free films.

I would say any creative person has that: you can't just force a topic. Whether you're a painter, you want to do a cartoon. Anything. Something may come up that's not your style or suited to what you are working on at the moment. So you file it away and hopefully find a place for it.

When I try and extract what it is about my music that I do or love or try to create, I'm never aware of it at the time. I just make something.

I chose to do art in the way I always do it, which is with all the crazy contradictions of life in there.

When I sit down to make music, I try to enter a flow; I always open a blank session and just make something that I feel like making. Only after a piece of music is done does my frontal cortex allow me to organize what might be trying to come out of my subconscious.

I don't consciously sit down thinking I'm blurring genre lines, for the most part. I try to stay focused solely on serving the needs of the particular story on which I'm working.

There are some projects where you have to just start doing it, and, after a while, the show starts telling you what it wants to be. You put your spirit in and, after a while, something bigger takes over, and it turns out to be much more fun and creative than what it was at the beginning.

I think if you're a creative person, then you're always kinda looking to move things along - 'Where else can I go? Where can I take this?' From painters to photographers - anything creative in the arts - if you're a true artist, I think you'll always look to do something else. 'Where else can I go with it?' Do you know what I mean?

Imagine a master painting that's never finished...when you can only build on previous work, you become limited by what you can paint...If you are in the midst of painting a forest full of tall tress and hanging vines, it is rather difficult to wake up the next day and suddenly turn that paining into the beach and ocean...We have to treat each day like a black canvas on which we can paint. Yesterday might have been paining flowers, but today you can paint cars or horses. A new day represents a chance for renewal.

I think that there's no doubt that to work in film is a bit more of a creative journey. It's not that I don't put the same time or heart into something that's on television.

To know what you’re going to draw, you have to begin drawing... When I find myself facing a blank page, that’s always going through my head. What I capture in spite of myself interests me more than my own ideas.

The trick is to compose what one wants to compose and to get it commissioned afterward.

That's how I'm able to work and move between so many different genres - I want to be part of what's happening, I want to make new things.

The artist is called a creator.

It's different if you're a painter. You can hidethe ones that don't work. You can't do that with movies. They tellthe story of who you are at the time, and that's the wonderful thingabout it.

Nobody will stop you from creating. Do it tonight. Do it tomorrow. That is the way to make your soul grow - whether there is a market for it or not! The kick of creation is the act of creating, not anything that happens afterward. I would tell all of you watching this screen: Before you go to bed, write a four line poem. Make it as good as you can. Don't show it to anybody. Put it where nobody will find it. And you will discover that you have your reward.

When one starts from a portrait and seeks by successive eliminations to find pure form... one inevitably ends up with an egg.

I'm pretty self-conscious, so I tend to work in a way where I say what I need to say and get out rather than revisit things. It's kind of a collage style. I realized that it had more emotional weight that way. I'll always be in the developmental stages as far as being a songwriter.

I think basically I'm a painter, but I would use anything to make my point.

There are two kinds of filmmaking: Hitchcock's (the film is complete in the director's mind) and Coppola's (which thrives on process). For Hitchcock, any variation from the complete internal idea is seen as a defect. The perfection already exists. Coppola's approach is to harvest the random elements that the process throws up, things that were not in his mind when he began.

The one thing about being a creator, about being an artist, is that you get to explore your ideas. We're fortunate that we're in the position to do that, and I don't take it for granted.