Box Brown Quotes

It became clear to me that I had to push it toward a more representational way of drawing.

All the important drawings I do myself. Every single character is also done by me.

I don't labor over my drawings. I want to get freedom in the line.

Matisse was my God. I'm a French artist, that's for sure. I am color-oriented and what you might call a composer. I am not pouring my guts out; I keep them inside.

Giorgio Morandi's paintings make me think that artists may not totally choose, or even control, their subjects or style.

My attitude towards drawing is not necessarily about drawing. It's about making the best kind of image I can make, it's about talking as clearly as I can.

Basically everything I've done in art, I was in possession of when I was 20 years old. I use a waste retrieval method of working. I'll go back and use something that disgusted me 15 years ago but that I had enough sense to think about. Some artists change dramatically. I see my work more like history being written.

I have been known as the minimal and conceptual artist for over five decades. I think I haven't changed much.

I separate cartooning, which is fun and wacky and soulful, from illustration, which is very well-drawn and extremely uptight to look at. There's a difference. I'm a cartoonist.

When I was living in Mexico, I started reassessing my drawing style, and plunged into a period of doing exercises and research to develop a new way to draw. The result was a style that implies more than it shows, and so, ironically, feels more "true" to the scene I want to draw than a style that is more specific. It seems to me that the reader's imagination is able to fill in the gaps more effectively than I ever could. Plus it's a lot faster and more fun to do.

The same person is coming through in a different medium.... My art is simple, direct and definite.

I'm not one of those artists having people there lying around on their paintings, you know, like Hockney or whoever.

The different styles I have been using in my art must not be seen as an evolution, or as steps towards an unknown ideal of painting. Everything I have ever made was made for the present and with the hope that it would always remain in the present.

If you wanna be an artist carry sketch pad with you, and sketch everything you see. Get so you can draw anything and it looks like what it's supposed to be. It's a lot of work, but if you really have it in you, it's not like work. It becomes fun.

As an artist, you take things from your environment, and there's going to be a style coming out of your environment.

Cartooning really is just designing.

I'm constantly learning as a songwriter, so naturally that makes you grow as an artist. But I also think the more time I spend in music the more time I feel I understand it; or at least I understand where I stand amongst the industry and my identity within it all.

It does take a long time and a lot of paint to become our own artist.

I was trying. I was crawling. I was coming into myself. I was trying to in some ways get beyond - what is the word that I'm looking for? - metaphorical language in painting, and to create something that was more indexical. And what I mean by that is that when you go to the library there's an index card that refers to a book that's actual and real in the world. So that index relates to something real.

Technique is really personality. That is the reason why the artist cannot teach it, why the pupil cannot learn it, and why the aesthetic critic can understand it. To the great poet, there is only one method of music - his own. To the great painter, there is only one manner of painting - that which he himself employs. The aesthetic critic, and the aesthetic critic alone, can appreciate all forms and all modes. It is to him that Art makes her appeal.

I'm a sponge, the more I absorb, the more I am able to articulate my vision, as artists do, like Picasso. I'm an artist in that light. I went from being an artist to an artiste.

In abandoning the vagueness of the sketch the artist shows more of his personality by revealing the range but also the limitations of his talent.

I have no idea how I do anything. I never have. You know I just started playing guitar and started singing and started working on this act that I would call "Don McLean" when I was probably in high school. And I have been doing this for 40 years, adding songs and writing things, cobbling together albums, doing live things, you know, albums and tours. And then I have records on the charts. I have no idea how this happened.

I've had a period of drawing on canvas in black - with some of my early images coming thru -, think the non-objectivists will find them disturbing - and the kids who think it simple to splash a 'Pollock' out.

I've never been a representational artist at all. Most artists have been representational. That's when you discover yourself.