Brian Posehn Quotes

I have got pictures all around the rooms I sit in. I have got a very mad picture of a dog standing on a black thing on a piece of rope. It was drawn and painted by a Romanian poet who was under house arrest, and it is terrific.

I love taxidermy. I collect taxidermy. I'm fascinated by the art of taxidermy. But on a more artistic level, I look at taxidermy as pulling something from the wild and taming it, and posing it in a style of your own personal pleasure that will last forever, and ever, and ever.

I had given up ( around 1950, fh) any ambition of making a career as an artist…..I had lost all interest in the art shown in galleries and museums, and I no longer aspired to fit in that world. I loved the paintings done by children, and my only desire was to do the same for my own pleasure.

I wrote about Freud and the process of sublimation, which is when you learn to stop breast-feeding, or stop going to the toilet whenever you want to. It's about learning to repress a desire for instant gratification. And in a repressed society, artists fulfil a sense of harking back to instant gratification, or immediate expression, by doing things that function on the edge of society, or outside of what is conventionally accepted.

Art should be appreciated with passion and violence, not with a tepid, depreciating elegance that fears the censoriousness of a common room.

With an artist no sane man quarrels, any more than with the colour of a child's eyes.

How could we possibly appreciate the Mona Lisa if Leonardo had written at the bottom of the canvas: 'The lady is smiling because she is hiding a secret from her lover.' This would shackle the viewer to reality, and I don't want this to happen to 2001.

Only an individual can imagine, invent, or create. The whole audience of art is an audience of individuals.

When people go to museums and see a sculpture made out of marble, they appreciate it but it's very doubtful that they will go home and have a slab of marble they can chip away at, but people do have LEGO. I don't have any LEGO specially made for me, all of the shapes, sizes and colours I use are available in stores so that if someone is inspired to create on their own, they can go and buy the very same bricks.

Painting is the supreme form of expression; you don't need to 'read' painting.

A sculptor is supposed to be a dull dog anyway, so why should he not break out in colour sometimes, and in my case I'd as soon be hanged for a sheep as a lamb.

Why should I need an artist to explain a work of art to me? Why should it not speak out to me itself?

I wanted to kill art for myself.. ..a new thought for that object.

One can do good things without being very much of a harmonist or a colourist. It is sufficient to have a sense of art - and this sense is doubtless the horror of the bourgeois.

Art is not made for anybody and is, at the same time, for everybody.

If Picasso walked into Disney looking for a job, they would throw him out on the street. Couldn't draw good enough.

I liked working in advertising, but don't believe my taste in art, such as it is, was entirely formed by TV commercials. And I don't feel especially conflicted enjoying a Mantegna one day, a Carl Andre the next day and a brash student work the next.

Everyone who has any talent at all in sketching, painting, sculpturing or carving, should have the opportunity to use that talent. The expression is important for the person, and can tremendously enrich the lives of other people. What can you do?

One can thus state, without fear of being wrong, that every truly artistic production has been conceived and executed according to the principle of irregularity.

The key to attempting to create art in some aspect is also knowing that it will turn some people off.

I'm glad [Ornette Coleman] is such an individualist. I like the firmness of thought and purpose that goes into what he's doing, even though I don't always like to listen to it. It's like living in a house where everything's painted red.

Spending money on art has always been frowned upon in this country - even earlier, when my and others' paintings cost almost nothing. Something is always more important. The people in charge are always peddling reasons that others seem to accept. Those who don't drink and aren't crazy, or who don't attract attention with how they behave in public, aren't noticed in art.

The Louvre is the book in which we learn to read. We must not, however, be satisfied with retaining the beautiful formulas of our illustrious predecessors. Let us go forth to study beautiful nature, let us try to free our mids from them, let us strive to express ourselves according to our personal temperaments. Time and reflection, moreover, little by little modify our vision, and at last comprehension comes to us.

If you're wandering the streets, talking in gibberish, nobody ever asks you to change anything about your art because there's no context for people to look at what you do.

It is, of course, a luxury to create art and, on top of this, to insist on expressing one's own artistic opinion. Nothing is more luxurious than this. It is a game and a good game, at least for me; one of the few games which make life, difficult and depressing as it is sometimes, a little more interesting.