Glenn Ligon Quotes

Painting is as close as a person can get to actually capturing the heat of the moment.

The important thing is to remember what most impressed you and to put it on canvas as fast as possible.

Animators can only draw from their own experiences of pain and shock and emotions.

Sure, you always put some of your own experience into a film.

My memory of those places is better than my pictures. That's why I get much more satisfaction out of shooting thematic work that has to do with an idea that I'm searching for, or searching to express.

I recognize very much in Hopper that it does look like the United States; it looks like the 30's and my first impressions of everything, all of which I have to deal with and which gets mixed up in my work and probably gets mixed up in everybody else's work too.

I've always kind of ripped from real life to some degree or at least how I'm feeling in the moment.

I start listening to something, or I'm seeing somebody a lot or seeing their art. And then I just really want to make a picture of them.

So much of what we do as artists is a combination of personal experience and imagination, and how that all creeps into your work is not so linear.

The things that I paint are things that I know very well.

For me, drawing is everything, because it informs everything. It even informs my poetry. It's the way I begin everything.

I remember everything I know even the most superficial things. And what comes out is in my canvases.

I think, if one is a painter, all you experience does come out when you’re painting.

In many ways my paintings are about energy — both in how they are created and the image itself.

If you scratch a great photograph, you find two things; a painting and a photograph.

I've always had a certain fascination. It's basically paint what you know, and this is what I grew up with.

Sometimes when you're writing a song and that song comes into your head, it definitely comes from somewhere, like a real experience.

You're always going to write and draw inspiration from things that you're feeling, things that you've felt. It's kind of impossible not to unless you're writing a song and there's an exact scenario that you're trying to write a song for.

I've always kind of ripped from real life to some degree or at least how I'm feeling in the moment. In fact, maybe that's really it. In anything I've ever written, all the characters sound like me, which I don't think is a bad thing.

If you want to paint the inner life, you paint it from the exterior. From the exterior, you breathe the inner life into your painting.

For me, how I feel about what I wrote down turns into a song.

Painting is the passage from the chaos of the emotions to the order of the possible.

I don't ever work in a way where something is an illustration of an event, but when something is occurring at the same time I see it as very informed by that.

To me, art begets art. Painting feeds the eye just as poetry feeds the ear, which is to say that both feed the soul.

This truth must be recognized as a dogma and assume the validity of an axiom in the general understanding of painting.