Richard Diebenkorn Quotes

I've always said I'm more influenced in what I do by artists, and how they work, how they think, and the freedom they're given to work and think, than I really am by other writers.

If you're an artist, you want to draw from real life; you want to draw from experiences, emotion, and it's something that a lot of musicians juggle with. I've always found it so fascinating.

My work is through my emotions, so everything kind of goes together.

Painting allows me to use other portions of my brain pleasurably. Irony plays no part in what or how I paint. I paint the particular subject matter not to make polemical points but because I am interested in the human imprint on the landscape. I paint the landscape of my time and place with the stuff in it.

I sometimes wish I had never had to sell a painting. Every painting you make represents the time it was made and how you were feeling and what your influences were... You are never going to feel that way again, so you can never repeat it.

Art is the ability to communicate through an intermediary and to convey one's feelings through an isolated object. It's inspiration and incubation. Putting my subjective feelings into an objective form and then on to you for a subjective interpretation.

To be an artist, you need to play inside your work.

I don't think of work between albums. Of course, I go through regular life and I live and I experience different things, good and bad, and it does help me, but I don't think about writing or what I'm gonna do with whatever's going on while I'm going through it.

There is no abstract art. You must always start with something. Afterward you can remove all traces of reality.

A work of art which did not begin in emotion is not art.

When you're an actor or any kind of artist, you use your life as something to draw from in every experience.

I look at a lot of artists. I'm inspired by - I suppose I shouldn't say 'inspired,' but it's not really influenced. I am inspired. Art comes from art.

I believe that my music is just about feelings, and the style is just a side effect.

Music is very influential to my writing, as are theater and film.

There's always going to be life experiences that find their way into my songs.

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

The highs, the lows, the peaks, the valleys, whatever, it's all going to go into the art, whether I'm singing or acting or whatever.

A painting of a person can be descriptive, but for me it's about all the things that make up a picture - the feelings, the brushstrokes - more than describing somebody. People latch on to the personalities when they talk about my work and forget the other parts.

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.

But I think you have to - whatever the environment looks like, it does enter into people's art work one way or another; it's very remote or it isn't. It's remote in my work but it has to have a certain degree of ordinariness.

By painting colors and lines and forms seen in quickened mood I was seeking to make this mood vibrate as a phonograph does. This was the origin of the paintings in The Frieze of Life.

As a filmmaker, like any artist, when something affects me emotionally I think about it in those terms. It's my way of dealing with my thoughts, my fears and my hardships. I think the same can be said with any artist. For a musician, you're going to write a song about something that affects you emotionally.

For an Impressionist to paint from nature is not to paint the subject, but to realize sensations.

I paint a slice of life, whatever it is that day.

I don't draw on my inner life in my work.