Glenn Ligon Quotes

I wanted to be a painter, somewhere between Abstract Expressionism and Pop.

I like a lot of modern art. I like Chuck Close a lot. It doesn't necessarily directly influence the work I draw on the page.

When it comes to art, you just need to be focused on doing a great thing. Not thinking all about the business.

This new art made a deep impression on me, and I began to study it ardently.

My best efforts were some modern things that looked like very lousy Matisses. Thank God I had the sense to realize they were lousy, and leave Paris.

When you are older, you realise that everything else is just nothing compared to painting and drawing.

Whatever an artist's personal feelings are, as soon as an artist fills a certain area on the canvas or circumscribes it, he becomes historical. He acts from or upon other artists.

My whole life, I've always had to be surrounded by creative things. I find it relaxing to be in touch with creations by other people.

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.

I love art and I think I was destined to end up in some aspect of the arts.

I barely knew I wanted to be an artist. I liked my art classes and painting was fun, I guess, but I didn't realize that seeing the country was going to inspire me to further explore that... but that's what it did.

I have never subscribed to the Dirty Pallet school of painting.

I really want to continue doing art. I would love to go back to doing paintings one day.

I started making art during high school but thought I lacked the talent to become a true artist.

By the time I was 12, I had decided to be an artist.

I want to bring art into everything.

Kanye is a student of art. He's an art-school-dropout type of kid that will talk about art till the cows come home.

Warhol influenced me because of his writing. If I had never read his writings and interviews, I would never have understood his work.

I think about sculpture all the time. I work at it for ten to twelve hours a day. I even dream about it. If as a result I was only to produce something that everyone immediately understood I would't have been thinking very profoundly.

I didn't see an abstract painting until I was 18, when I went to Vincent Price's house and saw Richard Niebencorn, Wolff, Jackson Pollack. He had an amazing collection. I didn't know people painted abstractly, I thought I was just doing something wholeheartedly.

All I care about these days is painting — photography has never been more than a way into painting, a sort of instant drawing.

Maybe I was a little jealous or envious of the abstract painters - but the truth was I thought what they were doing was boring.

It took me twenty years to discover painting: twenty years looking at nature, and above all, going to the Louvre.

I have been surrounded by artists and paintings throughout my life. My father Ted Dyer is an artist, and from a very early age I have spent time painting and drawing.

Until I began to learn to draw, I was never much interested in looking at art.