Ron Funches Quotes

I read things and imagine them and then kind of start trying to kind of take what I imagine and make it visual for everybody else to see. It just happens to be my personal vision, and every person's is going to be different, every book reader.

No matter what I've worked on or what art practices I've delved into, they've always been an attempt to world-build.

It's a little bit like talking about the life of writing. The life of writing may be about many things, but it always begins with the writer. With the kernel of an idea, or a character, or an idea or a theme, or even an outcome. But for documentary photographers, photographs begin at that intersection of the real world and the imaginative inner world.

The artist's job, I think, is to be a conduit for mystery. To intuit it, and recognize that the story-germ has some inherent mystery in it, and sort of midwife that mystery into the story in such a way that it isn't damaged in the process, and may even get heightened or refined.

A drawing is an autobiographical record of one's discovery of an event - either seen, remembered or imagined. A 'finished' work is an attempt to construct an event in itself.

To be a great painter means to be a great poet: someone who transcends the limits of his language.

When I make a movie, I have both a specific and vague, amorphous dream idea of what the movie is going to be. Of course, I don't actually know what it's going to be, but I'm still striving to get to some place with it.

When the director has a vision for a piece that I've never heard before, and they can back that up with visuals, and they talk a good game, I get really interested in the world that they're trying to create.

Great art picks up where nature ends.

The size thing is not some gimmick or attention-getting trick but a genuine undercurrent of the work. Frank Gehry for instance likes to imagine his buildings as sculptures. I like to imagine my sculptures as architectural.

Great art is the outward expression of an inner life in the artist, and this inner life will result in his personal vision of the world.

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.

I've always looked at filmmaking as a lifestyle. There is no decision of when you go to work. It's a way of life: you're thinking about scripts; you see things and think, 'That could be interesting'... I don't think about my work as, 'Today I'll work on this, this and that.' It just comes to me.

All the great artists illustrate their approach to life in the work they make.

One of the things you do when you make a piece of art is you try to make the world you'd rather be in.

I believe, even when I'm doing my standup or my acting or whatever I'm doing, I believe in painting pictures.

I like directing. It takes a lot out of you, but I'd like to do it again - I just have to find a story I want to tell.

I was commissioned in 2003 to create an original show, and began developing 'Upwake.' 'Upwake' tells the story of Zero, a modern-day business man, going to work with his life in a suitcase, stuck between dream and reality and not able to decipher the two. I wanted 'Upwake' to have the same audiovisual qualities as a movie would.

A painter may be looking at the world in a way which is very different from everyone else. If he's a craftsman, he can get other people to see the world through his eyes, and so he enlarges our vision, perception, and there's great value in that.

Just as Renaissance artists provided narratives for the era they lived in, so do I. I'm always looking beyond the surface. I've done that ever since I first picked up a camera.

Things develop in front of my camera, and then I will try to do the best out of it. I am close, but in most of the scenes, I am trying not to be seen. I think that's the trick. I think it starts in your heart, goes to the head, and the head puts it into the finger.

You become the movie you are making.

To create a work of art is to create the world.

I often use hypothetical situations to generate information and imagery for paintings and to create a fictional space where a subject can be put into play.

Sometimes I can see the whole painting from the outset in my mind's eye. But more often than not, that idea doesn't last the duration of the painting. Sometimes it comes out easy, just as I had envisaged. But that is reasonably rare.