Mickalene Thomas Quotes

Not all paintings are abstract; they're not all Jackson Pollock. There's value in a photograph of a man alone on a boat at sea, and there is value in painting of a man alone on a boat at sea. In the painting, the painting has more freedom to express an idea, more latitude in being able to elicit certain emotion.

Why talk about sculpture when I can photograph it?

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

Painting is a nail to which I fasten my ideas.

The painter constructs, the photographer discloses.

Recording a scene with paint rather than film sinks you more deeply into your surroundings. You have to look a little harder and a little longer. And you end up with a memento.

My work, in a certain way, got started in 1996 when I did an exhibition of thirteen paintings that were solely based on fashion imagery.

What I can't tell with a photo I will tell with a painting, and what I can't tell with a painting I will tell with a video or text sometimes, et cetera.

Painting is the aesthetic side of the object but it has never been original, has never been its own goal.

I just say I'm an artist who works with pictures and words.

Painting is the frozen evidence of a performance.

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

My approach to portraiture is conceptual.

Painting is literature in colors. Literature is painting in language.

Painting is the intermediate somewhat between a thought and a thing.

Poetry is superior to painting in the presentation of words, and painting is superior to poetry in the presentation of facts. For this reason I judge painting to be superior to poetry.

I love painting. As far as photography is concerned, I understand nothing.

The painters have no copyright on modern art!... I believe in, and make no apologies for, photography: it is the most important graphic medium of our day. It does not have to be, indeed cannot be - compared to painting - it has different means and aims.

(Landscapes) are too close to painting. And TV has nothing to do with painting. It's just transmission. And you can't transmit a landscape, happily enough.

Unlike the older, more humanly shaped arts, which begin with a seed and accumulate their form organically, photography clips its substance out of an actual continuum.

And I think a painting has such a limited life anyway.

I think a painting should include more experience than simply intended statement.

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.

I'm very interested in the language of photography in relationship to painting.

Drawing is giving a performance; an artist is an actor who is not limited by the body, only by his ability and, perhaps, experience.